OT: on IDEs and code writing on steroids

[Christopher Wright]

BCS wrote:
> Hello Yigal,
> 
>> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>
>>> Yigal Chripun wrote:
> 
>>>> Make _is_ a build tool
>>>>
>>> Yes. But since it's on every Unix since almost 40 years back, it
>>> doesn't count here.  :-)
>>>
>>> Besides, it has tons of other uses, too. One might as well say that a
>>> text editor is a build tool. You construct (or erect) software with
>>> it. ;-)
>>>
>> Nope. it does count as an external build tool
>>
> 
> OK and so can bash because it can run scripts.

No, the main purpose of make is to build software. You probably wouldn't 
think to use a makefile to automate converting flac files to ogg files, 
for instance. Or look at bashburn -- it has a user interface (albeit 
using text menus rather than graphics). You might be able to do that 
with a makefile, but it would be seriously awkward, and you'd mainly be 
using shell scripting.

And bash does not have any special features to assist in building software.

> But that's not the point. Neither make nor VS's equivalent is what this 
> thread was about. At least not where I was involved. My point is that 
> the design of c# *requiters* the maintenance (almost certainly by a c# 
> specific IDE) of some kind of external metadata file that contains 
> information that can't be derived from the source code its self, where 
> as with D, no such metadata is *needed*. If you wanted, you could build 
> a tool to take D source code and generate a makefile or a bash build 
> script from it

If you wanted, you could create a tool to do the same with C# source 
code, assuming there exists a directory containing all and only those 
source files that should end up in the resulting assembly. If you follow 
C# best practices, this is what you will do -- and your directory 
structure will match your namespaces besides. But this is not enforced.