DConf 2013 keynote

[Jeff Nowakowski]

On 05/12/2013 02:08 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/12/2013 9:42 AM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
>> Second, in the Q&A session of your talk, you said, "I'm sorely tempted
>> to say
>> that real men don't use IDEs..."
>
> Yes, but I said that as a joke.

It was said jokingly, but I have very little doubt it conveyed your true 
feelings. You have a history of brushing off concerns about IDEs by 
relying on a remark from David B. Held that Java needs an IDE to 
generate boilerplate, which I will say to the contrary is one of the 
lower priority reasons of why I find IDEs so useful for Java.

Do you use an IDE? Have you even tried one in the past 10 years?

> No, the sentiment was that an IDE was not the solution to a language's
> deficiencies.

That's fine, but when somebody asks you about D support for IDEs, 
"joking" about "real men" not needing one doesn't inspire confidence you 
actually understand the value. Maybe in your next keynote you can talk 
about how D has first-class support for IDEs, much like you did for unit 
tests.

One way to get first-class support is to make the compiler amenable to 
being used as a library, something that's been suggested before. I'd be 
happy to be told I'm out of date, and this support is already in the 
works or at least on the radar.