Wish: Variable Not Used Warning

[Robert Fraser]

Bill Baxter Wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Robert Fraser
> <fraserofthenight at gmail.com>wrote:
> 
> > Jussi Jumppanen wrote:
> >
> >> Bruno Medeiros Wrote:
> >>
> >>  Before some people here say they don't use an IDE, but instead use
> >>> <editor foo with syntax highlighting and little more than that> and are fine
> >>> with it,
> >>>
> >>
> >> I would say that the reason developers still prefer to code with text
> >> editors rather than IDE's is they find the text editor more productive.
> >> Eclipse based IDE are just far too slow for a good developer's fingers.
> >>
> >> When you're used to a super quick, highly responsive editor, it can be
> >> terribly frustrating to have you step down to a slow IDE.
> >> The slowness of the keyboard response turns what was an automatic action,
> >> that of typing, into a though process and this plays havoc with the
> >> 'thinking about the code while I type' through process.
> >>
> >
> > Bullshit. Do you have a 200 MhZ Pentium with 128MB RAM? Even then, IDEs are
> > going to prioritize the editor itself over any autocomplete/background
> > processing, so the editor shouldn't be any less responsive. It might take 5
> > seconds if you click "go to definition" and it has to open a new file, but
> > that's vs 2 minutes of searching for an import, finding the file location,
> > and using find to get to the definition in that file.
> >
> > The issue is the placebo effect and the comfort zone... which are real
> > issues (that's why so many people are like "oh, Vista is soooo bloated
> > compared to XP"...). If you've been using ed to write code for the last 30
> > years, the mental concept of using your $2000 computer to its full potential
> > to help you write software is mind-boggling. If you're more comfortable with
> > your "power-editor" or just can't deal with a 1-minute startup time for a
> > product you're going to be using for 8 hours, well all the more power to ya;
> > no amount of productivity gains could make you willing to switch.
> >
> > I'm not saying "more complex is always better," but why let all that
> > processing power go to waste?
> >
> 
> I think part of the problem is that there are a whole lot of IDEs that
> really don't live up to the potential you guys are talking about.  Plus IDEs
> come with their own set of problems.  For instance I just wasted most of a
> day getting a MSVC7 project set up to also work with MSVC9.  That's just
> ridiculous.  Microsoft goes and makes these minor changes to their project
> file formats for every release of Visual Studio, and then only provide a
> tool to do 1-way, in-place upgrades of all your project files.  It's
> insane.  Just imagine if you were forced to fork your makefiles for every
> dang version of GCC that comes out.  The way project management works in
> IDEs is often just completely silly like that.
> 
> The so called "Intellisense" in Visual Studio also has historically been
> pretty lame, with refactoring support basically non-existant.  The Visual
> Assist add-on from Whole Tomato was pretty much a "must" to bring it up to
> snuff.  I get the impression that the Java IDEs offer a lot more on the
> refactoring frontier.  So that's just to say, it's easy to get the
> impression that IDEs are not useful because there are many IDEs that
> genuinely are not that useful.  I can see where Jussi is coming from.  I
> have a feeling when Brunos says "IDE" he's thinking of IDEs at their very
> best.  Not another one of these lame editors with syntax highlighting and a
> "compile" button that claims to be an IDE.
> 
> I still primarily like to use my good ole emacs for writing large amounts of
> new code.  There I don't find all the little buttons and completion popups
> and things in an IDE very useful.  But when it comes to debugging and fixing
> code, damn it's nice to have the IDE there with all it's quick cross-linking
> abilities.  The integrated debugger in MSVC is also damn fine.
> 
> --bb

VS is crap (when the VS team is using Source Insight to develop it, you 
know something is wrong...). Even Visual C# pales in comparison to what 
I can do with Eclipse + JDT for Java; you have to use ReSharper to get 
the functionality a real IDE can provide.