Dscanner - DCD - Dfix ... Editor support or the lack of it.

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 06:18:02PM +0000, Dgame via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> It's nice that this works for you, but I strongly believe that most of
> the programmers who are willing to try something new are younger and I
> also think that most of them don't use VIM/Emacs on a daily basis.
> It's impressive that you can do it and I'm sure it works for you
> pretty well, but I doubt that younger programmers do the same - the
> hurdle to work with those tools is way to high at the start.

You know, before I started using Vim, I hated it and found it difficult
and counterintuitive to use. Then one day my then-boss convinced me to
give it an honest try.  I did, and I still hated it... but I kept at it,
and as time went by, it started to "click", and suddenly it dawned on me
that it's not "just" an editor; it's an *editing language*.  Then new
vistas opened up to me, that allowed me to things like routinely edit
8000-line source files without getting lost, and to do so far more
efficiently than any GUI can ever hope to be.  Even today, I'm learning
new things to do with it that can improve my productivity even more.
I'd never go back to my babyish days of point-and-grunt.  Was it an easy
learning curve? I won't lie -- it's not. It takes time and dedication,
something this coddled generation seems unable to grasp, it seems. But
the rewards far outweigh the investment.


> One of our programmers use VIM too, but on a regular basis he has
> problems like finding/renaming files/variables or optimize imports or
> code formatting.  I bet you can do that with the right tools and a lot
> of time as good as an IDE can do it, but the IDE can do that out of
> the box without consuming your time.

This sounds to me like inexperience.  If one doesn't know the ins and
outs of his tools, it's not surprising that he has trouble being
efficient at doing his work.

I use ctags with vim, and it's amazingly efficient: two keystrokes and
I'm right at the right file in the right place on top of the definition
of an identifier. Less than 1 second.  Yet when I work with my coworker,
who uses a fancy GUI-based IDE, he has pull up the search function,
re-type the identifer that the cursor is already sitting on, then wait
for the thing to slowly churn through 50,000 source files looking for a
pattern match, then reach for the mouse and drag the scrollbar down a
long list of possible matches, then open the file, then navigate to the
right place in the file. An order of magnitude slower.

Of course, having said that, some of my *other* coworkers who also use
vim are equally slow, if not slower, because they haven't learnt how to
use it to the max. As I said, that says to me "inexperience" rather than
"the tool sux".

As for renaming files, what has that got to do with Vim?  It's just
ctrl-Z, `mv orig.d dest.d`. Maybe followed by `git add dest.d`. Two
seconds max.  Again, being unable to work with the OS efficiently is not
a sign of an inherent flaw of the OS, just the inexperience of the user.


> It's like I said - if you mainly used VIM/Emacs you think everything
> is fine and would not try an IDE - but that's not what nowadays
> happens to new programmers. And to make D appealing to them, D has to
> offer good IDE support or it will remain as a hobby language with very
> few exceptions.

I never said we should not offer good IDE support, in fact I said that
we *need* good IDE support.  But that in no way justifies the wrong
claim that you can't be productive without an IDE. In fact, I find
myself *more* productive without needing a memory-hogging, CPU-hogging
GUI program that requires taking my hands off the keyboard all the time,
just to edit code. But I'm sure you think the same about Vim/Emacs, so
we're square. :-)

To each his own.


T

-- 
Music critic: "That's an imitation fugue!"