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On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 8:53 AM, Joel Marchesoni <[log in to unmask]>wrote: > I agree with Dan's last point about avoiding using a special IDE to develop > with a language. > I'll respectfully, but vehemently, disagree. I would say avoid *forcing* everyone working on the project depend on a special IDE -- avoid lockin. Don't avoid use. There's a spectrum of how much an editor/environment can know about a program. At one end is Smalltalk, where the development environment *is* the program. At the other end is something like LISP (and, to an extent, Ruby) where so little can be inferred from the syntax of the code that a "smart" IDE can't actually know much other than how to match parentheses. For languages where little can be known at compile time, an IDE may not buy you very much other than syntax highlighting and code folding. For Java, C++, etc. an IDE can know damn near everything about your project and radically up your productivity -- variable renaming, refactoring, context-sensitive help, jump-to-definition, method-name completion, etc. It really is a difference that makes a difference. I know folks say they can get the same thing from vim or emacs, but at that level those editors are no less complex (and a good deal more opaque) than something like Eclipse or Netbeans unless you already have a decade of experience with them. If you're starting in a new language, try a couple editors, too. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are free and cross-platform, and have support for a lot of languages. Editors like Notepad++, EditPlus, Textmate jEdit, and BBEdit can all do very nice things with a variety of languages. -- Bill Dueber Library Systems Programmer University of Michigan Library