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Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended?

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Joshua Landau <joshua@landau.ws> writes:

> On 12 September 2013 00:44, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > mnish1984@gmail.com writes:
> >
> > My main advice: Avoid non-free (that is, proprietary) software for your
> > development tools. Learning a set of development tools is a significant
> > investment, and you should not tie that investment to a single vendor;
> > if they lose interest for whatever reason, your investment is stranded.
>
> If the time learning a set of tools is enough to make the choice
> between tools, I suggest avoiding, say, Vim.

Rather, the effort (not merely time) spent learning a set of tools is
enough to advise choosing tools that will be around and supported by the
community for a long time, and have a wide applicability.

Any software that is non-free cannot be improved by its community, only
by the vendor. That makes it a poor choice for a tool that takes effort
to learn (such as an IDE); it can be abandoned by one party, and then
no-one can improve it further. Free software does not have that problem.

Development tools need to repay their user's investment by being
usefully applicable to a wide variety of tasks. The set of tasks a
programmer needs to perform is broad, and cannot be anticipated early
on; the tools need to be flexible and adaptable by the community of
users to tasks that the tool vendor never thought of.

So Vim and Emacs are both good investments by that standard.

> I find that going for whatever makes you most productive is more
> important than trying to minimise the learning time.

Agreed, and productivity is greatly improved if the tool one has already
learned to use can be used for a broad range of tasks for many years.

> Most software is much easier to learn that Vim, if you have to replace
> it after 10 years or not.

Having to learn many incompatible tools for what is effectively the same
task – whether that task is editing text, running the test suite,
interacting with VCS, invoking a debugger, and so on through many other
IDE tasks – is a poor investment.

Better to learn these once, in a single powerful tool that can be
maintained independent of any one vendor for as long as its community is
interested.

-- 
 \           “Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to |
  `\                                               think.” —Niels Bohr |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney

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better and user friendly IDE recommended? mnish1984@gmail.com - 2013-09-11 07:14 -0700
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org> - 2013-09-11 15:51 -0400
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2013-09-12 09:44 +1000
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Joshua Landau <joshua@landau.ws> - 2013-09-12 08:09 +0100
    Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Paul Rudin <paul.nospam@rudin.co.uk> - 2013-09-12 16:47 +0100
      Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Veritatem Ignotam <veritatem.ignotam@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 12:00 -0400
      Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Joe Junior <joe.fbs.junior@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 14:04 -0300
      Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Joshua Landau <joshua@landau.ws> - 2013-09-16 05:42 +0100
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> - 2013-09-12 18:04 +1000
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Joshua Landau <joshua@landau.ws> - 2013-09-12 11:02 +0100
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Paul Pittlerson <menkomigen6@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 03:55 -0700
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Fabio Zadrozny <fabiofz@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 09:12 -0300
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Wayne Werner <wayne@waynewerner.com> - 2013-09-12 09:22 -0500
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Westley Martínez <anikom15@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 10:23 -0700
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? Adrián Espinosa <mortuuslordofdeads@gmail.com> - 2013-09-12 14:15 -0700
    Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? memilanuk <memilanuk@gmail.com> - 2013-09-14 14:22 -0700
      Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? eric@invalid.com (EricF) - 2013-09-16 02:48 +0000
  Re: better and user friendly IDE recommended? rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> - 2013-09-17 06:56 -0700

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