Comments on: Early adopters and IDEs (integrated development experiences)

By: G Barry

G Barry — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:34:39 +0000

Same here (20ish yrs).

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By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:03:10 +0000

While I can’t speak to product plans, I can say that automating the creation of IPS repositories from within the IDE is a great example of the “connection developer” notion I mentioned in my post. Imagine you are building a native application in NetBeans or Sun Studio (or, heck, Eclipse). You not only want the traditional edit/compile/debug an IDE gives you, you want publish as well, whether that’s publication of your source code to an online community (for developers) or publication of your binary code in a form that can be easily consumed within the target platform (for users). So the “connected developer” notion should allow you to easily do that, publishing not only to IPS repositories (for OpenSolaris) but also APT, yum, etc. repositories for Linux etc. Tie that in to the package management system in the OS (or the plugin center, extension repositories, etc. for other products), and you have the makings of an “App Store” that spans multiple products, making the platform more attractive (because more software is available for it in an easily consumed format) and providing a go to market vehicle for developers that want to deliver applications directly to the users of that platform.. Win win..

By: Lally Singh

Lally Singh — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:59:45 +0000

Oh, I meant the other way around. Will netbeans automate the creation of IPS packages for our software?

By: noodl

noodl — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:09:37 +0000

This no-doubt also falls under “too much faff” but one can get mouse-only cut/copy/paste using e.g. http://flyingmeat.com/flygesture/ with a mouse trigger to raise the gesture dialog.

It’s not a terribly sane option, but possible

This comment was originally posted on niq's soapbox

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:54:17 +0000

Correction: with enough poking, Mac OS X allows Terminal (and possibly other apps, but admittedly not OS-wide) to have focus-follows-mouse. It also allows move-without-raise using Cmd-click on background windows.

Apart from that, I do generally agree. I tried, for various perverse reasons, to get into .NET late last year; while I was mostly impressed with MonoDevelop, the GUI scene left me cold. I used Visual Basic 3 and 4 in a summer job many years ago, and for getting from window to widgets to code they actually worked bloody well. This seems to have been forgotten, with MonoDevelop and Glade going after all the surrounding frutz in later versions of Visual Studio and none of the usability of the underlying paradigm. I gave up.

Back to emacs for me, vi for you. They actually work. We know them and they do a handful of things well that is all we ask.

And I still have choice-paralysis over the underlying languages (Q, scheme, lush, anyone?).

This comment was originally posted on niq's soapbox

By: scaryreasoner

scaryreasoner — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:06:37 +0000

I tend to debug with print statements as well… it’s just, a lot of times, easier than firing up the debugger, setting breakpoints, stepping through, etc, to sprinkle a few printf’s around and see what’s going on. If you ever worked on the linux kernel (until recently) getting a debugger for it was enough of a PITA that printk’s were, and still are, the debugging tool of first resort.

I tend to use gdb mostly when I’m getting a segfault… get a backtrace from gdb, then sprinkle a few printfs around.

Gdb of course comes in very handy when printfs don’t seem to be getting you anywhere.

Tom Tromey’s blog is one place to see some of what’s going on with gdb. He’s posted a few things recently about python extensions to gdb, mainly, I think, related to debugging C++ programs. I’m too much of a luddite myself to have much truck with C++.

As for your gripe about “No way to use a window without raising it,” NO FREAKIN’ KIDDING! That is something that has bugged me for decades. The linux distro’s seem to default to similar behavior in their desktops, and it is literally the first preference I change on a new install.

As for the mouse cut-n-paste thing, JWZ has an essay explaining X Selections, Cut Buffers, and Kill Rings which might explain things to any confused windows user who don’t know what you’re talking about.

This comment was originally posted on niq's soapbox

By: Luddites or weenies? « niq’s soapbox

Luddites or weenies? « niq’s soapbox — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:41:53 +0000

[…] and I’m still debugging with print statements“. That didn’t jump out at me, but Ian Murdock saw it, and agrees. In such distinguished company as Tim and Ian, I think I can admit to my own luddite […]

By: Ooga Chaka

Ooga Chaka — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:46:16 +0000

Practically at the point of using java for systems programming so here goes

pfexec pkg install netbeans-desktop … done … yay!!

now .. can I use dtrace with java/netbeans and build an app with jython/jrbuy scriptable goodness and a xplatform UI (gtk? qt? gecko?, webkit, android?) for osol, linux, bsd, osx, iphone, openmoko, android vista? :-D Then … hookup via a few groovy javascript extensions to cool services from Yahooo (Sun please buy Yahoo if share price falls further) and badda boom!

At least android’s vm likes java and netbeans eclipse etc makes java as easy-ish as .NET so …

By: Shawn Walker

Shawn Walker — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:58:04 +0000

Lally,

Netbeans packages are already available at http://pkg.opensolaris.org/

You should be able to install them by just doing:

pfexec pkg install netbeans-desktop

…or from the packagemanager.

By: Lally Singh

Lally Singh — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:41:45 +0000

So it begs the question, when’s netbeans going to put out IPS packages for us?