[interfacekit] Re: What makes a good IDE?

Yeah, BC4 was a disaster for Borland; a lot of the Borland folk mark it
as being the beginning of Borland's decline.  BC4.5 was very solid.  BC5
introduced the whole object scripting thing which made the product
really unstable.  I joined Borland a couple of months after BC5 first
shipped and everybody was basically in a state of shock after weeks of
dealing with very upset customers.

All that said, BC5 still has a kick-butt project manager. ;)

e

Keith Poole wrote:
> 
> I was using BC 4 & 5 only a few months ago on a project for a small
> company - Personally, I found them reasonable, but rather bug ridden.
>  Currently, I'm working for a bank near Liverpool, and I'm writing C++
> for unix machines - the most sophisticated tool I have there is vi, and
> no debugger whatsoever.
> 
> About makefiles, they can do everything you could ever want, but are so
> complex and misunderstood that I've never seen a project that used them
> correctly.  For Windows development you're stuck with Visual C++, the
> compiler's poor, but the IDE is serviceable.  Mind you, from what I can
> gather about Visual Studio.NET, it'll be broken for a few years to come ;-)
> 
> Personally for large-scale development, I think you're stuck with
> vi-gcc-make, since they're the only tools available on all platforms,
> unless anyone knows of anything better
> 
>                 Keith
> 
> Erik Jakowatz wrote:
> 
> >Have you ever used Borland C++ 5.x?  Not C++ Builder; the older line of
> >products.  This, in my mind, represents (minus a few editing gew-gaws)
> >the pinnacle of non-RAD IDEs.  The *only* thing I didn't like about the
> >environment was the binary project file.  This was well before using XML
> >for everything under the sun was the hep thing to do, so I can hardly
> >blame them. =)
> >
> >In all honesty, it's been so long since I used BeIDE that I can't
> >remember the catalog of stuff I disliked about it.  What I do know is
> >that almost immediately after starting to code for BeOS, I moved to
> >using Eddie and makefiles (which I do *not* care for).  Not long after
> >that, Be started providing their whole makefile-engine thing and I moved
> >to that.
> >
> >I also use CodeWarrior for PalmOS *daily*.  While the environment is a
> >big improvement over the BeIDE version of CodeWarrior, project
> >management can be a real pain in the rear.  It nevers gets to be *too*
> >bad, simply because Palm projects are by nature small.  Using the tool
> >to manage something as big as Deco (my main BeOS project prior to
> >OpenBeOS, which happens to be a development environment) would be
> >completely out of the question -- the project manager just doesn't have
> >what it takes.  And Deco is small compared to what we're doing (a
> >thought which frightens me).
> >
> >In short, BeIDE is fine for managing small to medium projects (ignoring
> >any other complaints I might have about it, but can't recall), but
> >totally out of its depth on anything large scale.
> >
> >To answer the question posed by the subject, a good IDE should provide a
> >great editor (which is a lengthy subject all its own) and a project
> >manager which is capable of handling large scale projects which are
> >composed of numerous sub-projects which are quite large in and of
> >themselves.  It should be simple to navigate the entire source tree of
> >your project in a hierarchical manner, which (in most cases) is going to
> >reflect the directory structure on disk.  Changing options for the
> >top-level project, sub-projects and individual files should be simple
> >and intuitive.  When you want to tweak some obscure, low-level attribute
> >of a single file, it should be easy to find the appropriate dialog,
> >without having it in your face at all times.  Tabbed dialogs are great
> >for a lot of things, but I've seen a lot of users get confused by them
> >in IDEs.  Sometimes it's just better to have an "Advanced" button which
> >brings up the next level of propeller-headed goodness. =)
> >
> >So, really, BeIDE falls down for me on both of these counts.  I don't
> >like the editor -- the highlighting is pathetically simplified and there
> >aren't enough "goodies" which make editting easier -- and the project
> >manager is really *weak* (which is the part that is important for us).
> >If an IDE hasn't got those things covered right, pretty much anything
> >else it does really doesn't matter.  I seriously loved the tabbed editor
> >in C++Builder, but the wimpy project manager (inherited from Delphi,
> >where apparently no one does any large scale development) just drove me
> >nuts!  I always felt that if Borland dropped the BC5 project manager
> >into C++Builder, no one in their right mind would use anything else to
> >develop for Windows.
> >
> >Rant, rant, rant. =P
> >
> >e
> >
> >DarkWyrm wrote:
> >
> >>I remember a while a ago our discussion about JAM, make, BeIDE, and so 
> >>forth,
> >>and I was wondering what makes BeIDE so bad that we don't want to use it. 
> >>Not
> >>that I don't support what we're doing - I just was curious.
> >>
> >>--DW
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >

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