All this blogosphere chatter on ‘Hackathons’ inside companies makes it appear that this is a new idea.
For the record, the earliest note I have for such a thing was at NeXT software. They had a thing called “Small Apps Week”. I think the name pretty much says it all, and this was back in the late 1980’s… 20 years before.
I bet there were probably other companies that did similar things even earlier.
So, in a post before the previous, the Eclipse IDE was mentioned as a free IDE available for C++ work. Specifically, Eclipse and the CDT plugin for it.
I have a few opinions here.
It is painful that it requires a Java runtime setup. They have the capability of compiling the system to a native executable format and use GCJ, yet they refuse to do this.
It’s a bit clunky when getting started. It is very very busy from a UI point of view, so you may not know what the right thing is to do. It seemed like they filled up too much of the screen real estate (which is precious with an IDE).
Overall, I used eclipse a couple of years ago for a Java project. I found it to be pretty good.
Still, Java development for a web app is clunky in itself (you have to restart the web server/servlet container for any changes). The debugger attach and change in place was kind of cool.
The environment wasn’t snappy… that was a problem.
It is open source and it does appear like they are trying to provide the one IDE to rule them all.
However, like a lot of open source projects that get popular, I worry about the overall direction. I think the idea behind the system is “eat the java in order to get the benefits”. Also, the projects are very enterprise focused instead of general programming project focused. It also lacks
I think all of this is flawed, and it will cause programmers in other languages to reject the platform.
So, I guess I just keep an eye on their progress, but I haven’t found the cost of going into the Eclipse world worth it yet. I would only use it if I was doing a Java project.
I guess I’ll go over what I think the perfect IDE should be in another post.
Just to give you a heads up, over the next couple of months, I’m going to make some posts about IDE’s or Integrated Development Environments. I find the topic interesting because I’ve finally used a decent one and I “get it”. I think there are some interesting discussions around them.
First, if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s Visual Studio, I probably wouldn’t use them.
Second, when used properly, they can give a programmer a very significant performance boost.
Third, specific to me, there is a funny oscillation. I went from no IDE, to IDE, and back so many times it’s not funny. The most interested IDE I used was Project builder in NextStep. It was the only IDE that came with the OS and was pretty much required in order to build apps. After that, I was a Vi/Emacs guy for a while. Then I had a discussion with my friend Jack. He was an IDE guy and I wasn’t at the time. At the end of my contract where I was working in the same building, he was a Vi guy and I was the IDE guy (Visual J++).
So I asked Andrei Alexandrescu what the tools were that he uses.
The more, the merrier :o). I mostly use gcc, but that’s not my decision. I also use eclipse with CDT as my environment.
If you don’t know who Mr. Alexandrescu is, I’ll give you the 5 second low down. He is the author of a book called Modern C++ Design. I don’t have it (yet), but I’ve read about his articles on policy based design over the years. I think he is on the right track with his ideas and I wish the C++ standards committee would adopt them. This is the niche that C++ needs to be in…. very high performance engines or kernels (3d, signal processing, etc.)
Anyways, the reason I posed the question to him as because of the heavy use of templates that his design uses. Most of the C++ compilers that were out 2 years ago (and the one I use daily) cannot cope 100% with his code. So, knowing what tools he uses may help me and others understand what the best environment is, since it is the same one that he is using.
Why? Like a lot of good ideas on the Internets, you want to use them. Like a lot of good ideas, what is good in words, turns out to be impractical for the real world. You may spend a week trying to figure out that his SmartPtr class doesn’t do the right thing because the compiler you are using is doing the wrong thing. That is the case here. His ideas are good, but you must be prepared to bring up and test the toolchain to use his stuff (ie. have a few days to burn)
Finally, thanks to Andrei for even answering the question. As a popular C++ author, I’m sure he gets lots of email. (Most of that email is probably “how come xyz doesn’t work?”) It was very nice that he replied to mine so quickly.
I really don’t like that you can’t delete email easily. However, with this GreaseMonkey script appropriately called Gmail Delete Button I can have my cake and eat it too. Thank you Greasemonkey and hordes of script writers.
In homage to, JWZ’s, Law of Software Envelopment:
``Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.''
Nelson’s Law of Modern Software:
``Any sufficiently popular program that has plug-ins or extensions (Web browser, IM, Email, etc) becomes an operating system within itself.. and a poorly written one at that.''
Passed to me from the homies at work.
(This one is awesome…) http://www.monzy.com/intro/drama_lyrics.html
While setting up the toolchain to build Thunderbird in debug mode, I noticed this web site.
Wow, they don’t make web sites like that anymore. So the question is this: are assembly programmers Trekkies or Jedi ?
