IDEs and programming languages

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
>>
>> I also agree with Walter about the lack of an IDE for D as powerful as
>> Visual Studio, I myself use poseidon only because of its overly simple build
>> process and simple project manager and debug in windbg. But that isn't the
>> case with most programmers who like or dislike a language based on the IDE
>> they use.
>
> I do hear over and over that without a VS workalike IDE, programmers just
> aren't interested in a language. They argue, probably with a lot of merit,
> that the productivity increase of using VS is more than the productivity
> increase of using a better language.
>
> It's clear Microsoft has hit a home run with VS.
>
> I was talking to some serious hardcore C++ programmers yesterday. One was a
> die-hard emacs user, and he admitted that he'd switched to VS and wasn't
> looking back, it was that much better. I asked him what the killer feature
> of VS was, and he said it was being able to instantly see every use and
> definition of a symbol.
>
> (With emacs he'd have to run ctags first, and even then ctags was inaccurate
> and clumsy.)

Yep, and being able to jump to the definitions of things instantly
without rooting around through a bunch of source files where you think
you remembered seeing it.  Or which sound promising based on the name
of the file.

But I think Descent can now do this kind of thing to some extent.  It
seems to be getting better and better all the time.

--bb