D IDE

[ShadoLight]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 00:16:16 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> On 09/03/2018 02:55 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> On Monday, 3 September 2018 at 16:55:10 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
>> wrote:
>>> But if you're ever expecting IDE support to be a top priority 
>>> of many of the contributors, then you're going to be sorely 
>>> disappointed. It's the sort of thing that we care about 
>>> because we care about D being successful, but it's not the 
>>> sort of thing that we see any value in whatsoever for 
>>> ourselves
>> 
>> Why is that? I've never used an IDE much, but I wonder why you 
>> don't and what your impressions are of why many other core D 
>> users don't either.
>
> I used to use them all the time, but it got too frustratingly 
> difficult to find ones that didn't take forever to start up, 
> and didn't lag like crazy while trying to get my work done.
>
> Plus, I've done so much development on so many platforms that 
> (even if only at the time) didn't have much in the way of 
> either IDE or debugger support (or good support for *my* 
> current IDE and required me to use *their* IDE), that I just 
> learned how to be productive with basic editor + file manager + 
> command line. With those, I can do pretty much anything I need 
> for just about any platform/language.
>
> Whenever I've relied on an IDE, I was constantly dealing with 
> bad support for X in language Z, no support for Y when deving 
> for platform W, trying to do Q was a big series of steps that 
> could NOT be easily automated, etc...It was an endless mess, 
> and trying to add support for XYZ was always a major project in 
> an of itself. And there was ALWAYS something new I needed 
> support for, but couldn't get and didn't have the time to 
> build. It was a series of prisons. Weening myself off IDEs 
> freed me.
>
> I'll tell you, it's REALLY nice being able to get my work done, 
> *improve* my workflow as I see fit(!!), in just about any 
> language I need, for just about any target platform I need, 
> without ever having to whine about "I can't use your tech 
> unless you build better integration with this one particular 
> IDE!" (Sound similar to anything often heard around here? ;))
>
> Plus, plain old non-IDE editors have come a LONG, long way in 
> the last 20 years. (For example, syntax highlighting used to be 
> something you mainly just got with the IDEs. Not anymore!)

I fully understand this. I think most of the IDE users get this. 
But there is another _fact_of_life_ that some of us (most of 
us..?) still have to deal with - we don't have a choice in this 
_at_work_!

We work full-time for employers which, in my case, employs 
thousands of engineers - and as a result engineering principles 
are applied to everything - including tools. So all SW dev teams 
here use standardized tooling/processes/coding standards/etc. - 
you simply do not have a choice to use your own editor of choice.

In my case it is C++ and C# on Visual Studio Professional, in 
other teams (say web based portals/etc) it is maybe Java on 
eclipse, etc.

In my team we often still have to do support/bug fixes/upgrades 
on legacy projects from people that are not even working here 
anymore. Most of the time migrating a complex project to your 
favorite IDE/editor/build system/whatever is simply not an option.

Nick - I suspect you work for yourself or on occasion as a 
contractor in different environments (and for  different 
customers) - so this is perfectly OK for you to have that view 
and opinion. But please be aware it is not the full story for 
others!

I don't get to use D at work so am strictly a D 'hobbyist' at 
home. So at home I can play with D and for some other toys 
(Raspberry-Pi!) and can use Sublime Text3 or cross compile C++ 
using Codeblocks or any other editor of my choice. (I just never 
made the jump to Vim/Emacs). But the same choices are not 
available at work.

I really miss the appreciation of this fact in these incessant 
'use Vim/Emacs' answers to people's queries on IDE support is the 
forum. This is not the reality for many people at work - this 
article [1] describes the reason why businesses prefer IDE's 
quite nicely.

Most of my colleagues are not interested in hobby coding at home 
- they consider their family life separate to their professional 
lives - and that is perfectly OK. It is their choice. But it 
makes it impossible for people like me to even try to push their 
managers to "try D" if it does not fit into the 
workflow/processes that are already followed. For me (like for 
Manu [2]) this absolutely necessitates that it supports Visual 
Studio integration _out_of_the_box_!

When I read answers like yours and Jonathan's it always makes me 
wonder: does D want to cater for the kind of businesses I 
describe as well? If not, ok - that is a perfectly valid answer 
and D can, as a consequence remain the slightly obscure language 
it has been up to now - used by enthusiasts that are willing to 
go the extra mile to get stuff done, and can hack around any 
limitation. That is perfectly fine.

But if the D community want to achieve the big critical-mass 
breakthrough into mainstream programming with lots of commercial 
customers I suspect that Manu's views [2] need to be realized and 
the tooling need to be on par than what Java/C# devs are used to.

I know the "we use Vim/Emacs, why don't you pitch in and help on 
VisualD if you want to use it" view is valid opinion, but it will 
not bring the masses since it will never happen - the critical 
mass is composed of devs that want to _use_ VS/eclipse/etc - not 
_develop_ to enable them. Besides, they are not coding at home, 
and there is very little incentive for said enterprises to assist 
with this - they see it simply as a cost if D does not offer 
sufficient benefit over C#/java/etc. So this is not going to 
happen except as an effort inside the D community itself.

[1] 
https://codecraft.co/2014/05/13/why-you-should-use-an-ide-instead-of-vim-or-emacs/
[2] 
https://forum.dlang.org/post/mailman.3572.1536035692.29801.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com