DConf 2013 Day 3 Talk 1: Metaprogramming in the Real World by Don Clugston

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, June 14, 2013 10:05:27 Peter Alexander wrote:
> On Friday, 14 June 2013 at 07:40:42 UTC, Don wrote:
> > On Friday, 14 June 2013 at 06:49:08 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> >> I agree. But he said at the end of the talk that he didn't
> >> want codecompletion refactoring or anything like that. Now he
> >> said he just wants something better than Notepad that is
> >> stable.
> > 
> > I don't know what's going on here, somehow people are
> > consistently misunderstanding me.
> > 
> > The question in the talk was along the lines of "what's wrong
> > with D's IDEs". And people expected the problem was that they
> > don't have good refactoring support or something. But the
> > 
> > problem is much more severe:
> >  Mono-D is not as good as Notepad.
> >  EclipseD is not as good as Notepad.
> > 
> > Because they are unstable.
> 
> What we're not understanding is that, if you don't want
> refactoring, or intellisense, or any of that stuff then why not
> just use notepad, emacs, vim etc.? Surely those are stable?
> 
> That's why people were asking what you wanted from the IDE, so
> that they could suggest stable editors that had those features.
> If you don't want lots of features then Mono-D and EclipseD are
> not good choices.

I don't think that it's that he doesn't want them. It's that they don't matter 
until the IDE is stable enough that it doesn't crash. If it crashes, it 
doesn't matter what else it can do. But once it's stable enough that it 
doesn't crash and you can actually use it, _then_ you can discuss what other 
cool features it should have. Until then, it's worse than notepad.

- Jonathan M Davis