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

[Benny]

On Saturday, 27 January 2018 at 22:58:27 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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. :-)

The problem is Teoh that learning a language in Vim or a IDE are 
two totally different things.

I used to program in Notepad because i grew up with PHP and knew 
it like the back of my hand. The result was very little need to 
see the documentation. The moment i found PHPStorm, i fell in 
love. Fast function jumping, remote tools, database at your 
fingertips, code checkers and hinters and all the other niceties.

But for anybody who is not a master of a language or even 
intermediate, a good IDE can make one so much more productive 
compared to the same person just relying on a default notepad 
type environment. The fact that a good IDE expands the methods 
from a class, it shows you the basic help / buildup of the 
methods calls so you know exactly where you write what, without 
the need to visit the developers documentation website.

It massif increases the adoption rate of a language, when your 
new to a language or not a 10 year expert.

And for the people who are used to a language, a IDE can still be 
useful by increasing productivity as you simply do ... example 
"fu" ... enter ... "function " or automated braked closing, or 
error indicators when you forget something so you do not wast 
your time discovering a stupid issue during compilation.

Its the same issue i personally have with languages that get lazy 
and trow out readability in exchange for less keystrokes. You can 
at times tell what development ides a language uses simply by 
looking at the language. Everything awkwardly shortcut like "fn" 
and other shorthand ( but what do make it much more brain taxing 
for anybody new ).

Advanced programmers have the skills to make new languages, 
unlike beginner programmers but they also are so used to a 
specific environment that they build up to speed up, over the 
year, that they assume that everybody else can get going just as 
fast as they are.

As a side note, despite working years in Vim, i still prefer a 
normal but well equip IDE because there are just some things VIM 
is not good at ( unless you customize it to hell with 100's of 
plugins what tends to take years to find your sweet spot and 
build up the know how to use them all perfectly ). VIM with all 
the plugins is simply a IDE, just one where you do not move your 
hands too much away from the keyboard. As your example of your 
colleagues: a IDE where it takes ages to jump to a definition in 
a file, is simply a incomplete IDE. Or maybe those colleges have 
not master the IDE. I know for a fact from myself that there is a 
massive amount of things still "hiding" in Jetbrain there 
products or Visual Studio Code that can make me more productive 
but you learn over time or when you stumble upon it.

 From my point of view, without a working IDE its much more 
difficult for a non-specific-language to learn and get better at 
the language. And again, VIM with the right plugins is a IDE, 
simple as that. Its annoying that people do not see this. The big 
difference is that VIM is designed around not moving your hand to 
your mouse and that is its major strength.

On a side note: The issue i had with the plugins, well one of the 
plugin authors found the issue and it came down to it that the D 
compiler had a regression that effect DCD. I remember mentioning 
before as how many times the compiler ends up breaking code.

Going over the D release list, you see way too many times: Major 
release - fix - fix, Major release - fix,  Major release - fix - 
fix... What indicates to me a lack of cross platform testing. 
Especially the amount of regressions surprises even me. It feels 
like too much focus is put upon new features and too few upon a 
test setup that does not only tests the compiler but also all the 
dub packages.