Tooling [ was Re: Pretty please: Named arguments ]

[Russel Winder]

On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 00:26 -0800, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Unfortunately, D is going to have to become fairly mature before we have much in 
> the way of really good IDE support. There _are_ options out there, but for the 
> most part, when programming in D, I expect that the average programmer is 
> forgoing the majority of benefits that a good IDE provides. So, while IDEs may 
> help a great deal with certain things in the long run, I wouldn't expect many 
> people to think that an IDE feature was a decent solution at this point 
> (regardless of what you're talking about), since they're probably not using an 
> IDE with such a feature at this point.

I wouldn't say mature, I would say has traction, or has market
penetration.  Basically the language can be as mature as Fortran, but
still be unused and hence have no community wishing to create tooling.
There is also the question of whether to fit in with something
pre-existing or create something new.  Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA,
Code::Blocks, NetBeans, Emacs, Vim?

For good or ill, the metric seems to be Eclipse support:  no Eclipse
tooling means no users.  C++ has dealt with this.

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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