C|Net brings us world news today: “An IBM executive has claimed that a “set of forces” is attempting to derail Linux, and hinted that Microsoft and SCO Group are among those responsible.”
Eeeeeeeek! SCO is sueing IBM and has a competing OS (UNIX), Microsoft has a competing called Windows, does anybody think it’s weird they do not help promoting linux and do not advocate it and try to push it out of the market? Geez.
Some programmers and designers do not like IDE’s such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Delphi or Dreamweaver and Frontpage for HTML. But why not?
My brother, who does a little C programming the so-called “die hard way”, i.e. using a plain text editor with no tools or whatsoever, saw me programming in Eclipse with auto completion, code generation, auto fixing of common made mistakes (variable name mistyping, which Eclipse can fix by itself) and error underlining while typing and he said “Hey, that’s not programming anymore!” Is it not? What is programming these days? Using a language that makes it as easy as possible to make mistakes, an editor that helps in no way? Do programmers like to make things as difficult as they can be? I don’t, but many seem to.
Why do people still use notepad for serious development? At least use an editor that does code higlighting if you really want to do lite coding. For many languages there are many great alternatives, Visual Studio is great for C, C++, C# and VB(.NET), Eclipse and IDEA are great for Java (and JBuilder and Netbeans for GUI Java code), Delphi’s a great development enviroment too. For PHP and Perl, Komodo is a great option.
But, come on! Dragging and dropping a program together, that’s not really programming, is it?
Well it depends on what you like to do. Personally I’d say, everything that the computer can do for you, let the computer do it. Why fiddle with coordinates if you can just drag a component to the right place. Why type all your getters and setters if they can be generated for you. Why write up a database access layer if there is software that can generate it for you? Or even, why write HTML yourself if there’s great software that allows you to focus on design and not stupid plain text codes and CSS stylesheets?
But you lose flexibility right? Well that depends on the IDE you’re using. It might be possible to write a WYSYWYG editor that can do everything HTML, Javascript and CSS can do and then, well you don’t lose anything. But if you can’t do everything in the IDE, so what? It’s just a tools and does not necessarily have to be a full, complete solution. There’s nothing wrong with making things easy.
Well I must say, I like LunarPages (the new host of KT) so far. I signed up sunday, got my account mail monday. I noticed java wasn’t working so mailed them, a couple minutes later I got a mail back that I was indeed on the wrong server and that they’d move me. Another couple of minutes later I was on a different server with everything working ok. If your DNS has update it might already work: KeyTopic.com.
During my vacation both zefhemel.com and keytopic.com have been down due to a move and some other problems. This site is back now, although some stuff is lost. And I’ll try to bring back keytopic.com back as soon as possible (with some cool updates by the way).
