OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Yigal Chripun]

Lutger wrote:
> Yigal Chripun wrote:
> 
> ...
>> IMO, designing the language to support this better work-flow is a good 
>> decision made by MS, and D should follow it instead of trying to get 
>> away without an IDE.
> 
> I'm not sure about this. D is designed to be easier to parse than C++ 
> (but that's saying nothing) to allow better tools made for it. I think this 
> should be enough. 
> 
> C# & friends not only better supports working inside an IDE, but makes it a pain to 
> do without. Autocomplete dictates that related functions should be named with
> the exact same prefix - even when this isn't logical. It also encourages names to be 
> as descriptive as possible, in practice leading to a part of the api docs encoded in 
> the function name. Extremely bloated names are the consequence of this. It doesn't 
> always make code more readable imho. 
> 
this I completely disagree with. those are the same faulty reasons I 
already answered.
an IDE does _not_ create bad programmers, and does _not_ encourage bad 
code. it does encourage descriptive names which is a _good_ thing.

writing "strcpy" ala C style is cryptic and *wrong*. code is read 
hundred times more than it's written and a better name would be for 
instance - "stringCopy".
it's common nowadays to have tera-byte sized HDD so why people try to 
save a few bytes from their source while sacrificing readability?

the only issue I have with too long names is when dealing with C/C++ 
code that prefixes all symbols with their file-names/namespaces. At 
least in C++ this is solved by using namespaces. but this is a problem 
with the languages themselves and has nothing to do with the IDE.

> The documentation comments are in xml: pure insanity. I tried to generate documentation 
> for my stuff at work once, expecting to be done in max 5 min. like ddoc. Turns out nobody at 
> work uses documentation generation for a reason: it isn't really fleshed out and one-click
> from the IDE, in fact it is a pain in the arse compared to using ddoc.
> 
> I should stop now before this turns into a rant.
> 

I agree fully with this. XML documents are a mistake made by MS. javadoc 
is a much better format and even that can be improved.

This however has nothing to do with the IDE. the important part is that 
the IDE parses whatever format is used and can show you the 
documentation via simple means. no need for you to spend time to find 
the documentation yourself.