On 7 January 2012 08:40, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:
news:mailman.144.1325892989.16222.digitalmars-d@puremagic.com...
>
> Most windows programmers will simply not consider the
> language until it is well supported in Visual Studio
>
Yea, and that's very unfortunate. I used to be a huge fan of visual studio
for years (from around MSVC 5 through the first or second VS.NET), but now
that I've tasted the alternatives, I find the build/project management to be
a little too "magical" and proprietary (or at least too incompatible and
inbred), and the UI to be too bloated. I think a lot of the people who are
unwilling to try anything but a heavyweight IDE are being unfair to
themselves and their projects by keeping themselves blinded. (Obviously, if
they've done both ways and still prefer big IDE's, that's different.)
Your personal opinion of people who use and/or prefer visual studio is irrelevant. Most windows devs use it, and love it. It's very important.
I for one am primarily a cross platform dev, NOT a windows/x86 dev, and I still use and prefer VisualStudio.
I have worked extensively on these platforms: Dreamcast, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, PS3, XBox360, Wii, PSP, NDS, iPhone, Android, Windows, and Linux... plus some others on occasion in the last 10 years. I rarely work on x86 platforms...
Unsurprisingly, almost every platform from that list above has reasonabe VS integration. Console SDK's are almost all exclusively VS based (this might be why most game devs use VS... perhaps a chicken/egg problem here, but nobody's complaining about it. Only when the VS integration is mediocre/half arsed to people complain...) .. Some older consoles tended to tie themselves to CodeWarrior, but thankfully, that dwindled, and the same platforms eventually adopted a VS integration due to demand. I've never heard of anyone who PREFERS CodeWarrior.
What would you propose I try to convince me that VS is shit and unproductive?
I do use build tools, like premake, which are able to produce VS projects (and makefiles, etc, for non-windows platforms/toolchains and useful for automated scripts)...
If you're going to talk about bloated heavy-weight IDE's, have you every tried using Eclipse? What a joke! How is it that so many years of OSS dev and Google backing it can produce such a bloated, crap, slow, inconsistent, unfocused/unintegrated tool?!
How about XCode? I don't understand how anyone gets any work done with XCode, it is just soooo crap.
So what are the alternatives? An endless mountain of annoying shell based build systems? I use them when I need to, I like premake at the moment, and have used others previously. It's an important part of the toolchain, but it generally results in a VS project for actually doing productive work...
So there you go, another opinion for you, yet I believe mine is shared by no small number of professional windows based devs ;)
And the thing is too, with popular overrated langauges like C++ or Java, you
*need* a fancy IDE to get anywhere and still maintain sanity. But what many
of those people don't get, is that with better languages, you *don't*
actually *need* all that other stuff. Sure, it can still be a nice bonus,
but it's *not* a necessity like with the popular "puzzle" languages they're
used to. It's like canned vegetables: You've gotta drench that shit in salt,
sauces, spices, and all sorts of stuff just to make it go down. But with
food that's quality in the first place, it doesn't matter: You can either
dress it up or leave it as-is; either way it still works
fine...no...*better* than starting with an inferior base.
Overrated? I don't think calling industry standards overrated is a reasonable claim. they're industry standards because everyone uses them... and everyone uses them because they are industry standards.
I've used C/C++ professionally my whole career with some C# taking over for tools recently. I hate C++! (that's why I'm here!).. I don't hype it up like it's awesome, but I use it because it's industry standard, there is no viable alternative, and even if there were, it would NEED integration with all my tools before I could use it professionally in a full production environment.
I don't NEED an IDE to work with those languages specifically, I *prefer* an IDE to DO WORK FASTER... I prefer an IDE even when I'm writing python for instance, and it annoys me that there's no IDE/debugger for embedded LUA.
If by 'better' languages, you mean D, then I completely disagree. D *NEEDS* an IDE, just like all the rest... and in my opinion, even more so... here are some reasons I find it so annoying there isn't a quality VS integration for D (yet):
** auto is used liberally in D... I should be able to hover over any variable and have a tool tip inform me what it actually is (this makes it more important that D has an IDE than even C/C++)
** I don't have years of experience with the libraries, I SHOULD be able to press '.' and have a list of everything the library can do appear instantly without wasting my time trawling through the docs.
* I shouldn't have to guess or try and remember the name of some member or method... I should be able to type the first 1-2 letters, and have the rest of the word will appear instantly.
* If I don't know what a type is, or want to know about it in more detail, I should be able to press F1 and see documentation about the class/function/whatever instantly.
* I'm new to the syntax, and it's terribly nice when a little red underline appears beneath a syntax error I've just created.
* As projects grow, things like auto-refactor save sooo much time. Extremely difficult to implement reliably for C/C++, but should work perfectly in D...
C# for instance, is becoming very popular. The reason for this is that it's just sooooo fucking productive, and that's not thanks to the language its self... any C# user will agree that at least 50% of C#'s special power is actually it's VS integration.
The first time I used C# (knowing absolutely nothing about the language), I opened VS, and started typing... thanks to the integration, the language was self-documenting and self-evident. I felt immediately productive in a language I hadn't even read a word about, and after a little more experience, I love its efficiency for writing the kind of code it's great at, and I always feel amazingly productive. The experience is not limited, or even thanks to the language, it's the whole package.
The C# experience gave me a new expectation from any new language... I shouldn't need to KNOW a language, or basically anything about it to start using it immediately. The IDE (auto-popup-documentation, code completion, info tooltips, etc) is what gives me that experience. Assuming the rest of the language and libraries are designed intuitively, it works.
The reason it matters so much to me...
I suspect I could actually propose using D in the office for small tasks, tools, etc... everyone hates C++, it wouldn't be hard to convince them to give it a try.
That said, If D doesn't have an IDE, or more specifically, VS integration, it's off the table. Period. In a multi-user project, where all users expect VS integration, I can't do without it.
If it can manage to make a splash with newcomers like C# does, people will be really impressed, and they'll keep coming back.