Mainstream D Programming

[Yigal Chripun]

Janice Caron wrote:
> On 10/14/07, David Brown <dlang at davidb.org> wrote:
>> Also, I tend to deal with lots of code in lots of different projects,
>> rather than a single project.  I find it better to have powerful, but more
>> general functionality, than a tool that often doesn't even know the
>> languages that I'm working with.
> 
> That's a very good point, and one with which I must concur. While I do
> use Visual Studio at work, I never bother with it at home because it
> doesn't know about all the languages I use. Sure it can do (a
> microsoft dialect of) C and C++, but it knows diddly squat about PHP,
> Javascript, or D. A powerful text editor, on the other hand, can
> easily be equipt to deal with any language whatsoever, and therein
> lies its true power. It is infinitely upgradable, and can be retooled
> for any new purpose just by editing text files ... for which of
> course, it serves as its own tool.
> 
> If IDEs were so great, there would be no talk of making an IDE "for
> D". Rather, your existing IDE would already be capable of doing the
> job.
well, that's a view created by using a MS product.
good IDEs (and i don't consider anything that comes from MS to be good, 
or standard or usfull or .. well you get what i mean... ) are based on a 
plug-in infrastructure. actually eclipse doesn't provide any 
functionally by itself, rather it works as a piece of software to manage 
plug-ins and their dependencies, everything else is a plug-in.
for example, my installation of eclipse could be called "Hyperpolyglot" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpolyglot) because i have plug-ins for 
sevral languages: c/c++/D, java, scala, php, perl, javascript, ruby, 
scheme, ..
also most good ides use plug-ins to implement refactorings, (intellij 
IDEA, eclipse and netbeans come to mind)
i even have VI plugin when i need it's keyboard style editing.
so if you want you really can enjoy both worlds - use a very advanced 
text editor [ vi :) ] and also have the power of an IDE.

so at least for me, it's easier to equip my eclipse with another plug-in 
for a different language or a new feature, rather than search the web 
for a way to add D support for my favorite text-editor (currently it's 
notepad++ on windows)