code rust
October 26th, 2006I am a programmer. I use ViM. exclusively. Like most who do, you start out a project with passion ultimately creating a pillar of functionality rooted strongly in proper syntax, pragmatic judgement, and clean layout. And probably well documented since you take the time to methodically create a masterpiece.
Every now and then I work with a package of source code so mangled, abused, and bloated that a wholesale rewrite is the immediate reaction. You know what I mean. Your reaction to rewrite is within seconds. One cause…. IDEs. So far, my arch nemesis is … Microsoft Front Page. I encounter a convoluted mess of nested HTML tag so blatantly and inexcusably inappropriate I want to start using emacs…. tag after nexted tag after tag… all wrapping a single ’space’.
Ok… IDE’s have their place. But not in my home.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
I don’t completely agree that the problem is IDEs - just a subset of them, namely WYSIWYG editors. Frontpage maybe the worst of them all. I use Dreamweaver when generating HTML as it has some nice code completion features, etc - but still do all the coding by hand. Seems to me to be the best of both worlds.
November 11th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Dave,
I agree with you for IDEs. Some of the code is so bloated it is unreal. They use no intelligent optimizations. Case in point, Front page. Every line has font/justification/etc tags which are redundant. A friend of mine once asked me what is my HTML editor - I told him notepad for windows and vi for linux. Nuff said on HTML. I know that IDEs have their place and have very good x-reference and symbol dictionary capabilities, but as a developer you have to crawl before you can run. You have to hand-code a linked list before you use the STL - and you have to use 2 or 3 xterm windows and do the xref-ing and debugging manually yourself before you can appreciate what the IDE is doing for you. Without that, you are becoming a much lesser quality programmer that you could become.