I've used Visual Studio, JBuilder, Eclipse, etc., and for the languages I used them for (C++, C#, Java), I felt the IDEs were essential. When I switched to Ruby, the same quality of IDEs weren't available, but I found I was much more productive in Ruby with a simple editor than I had been with other languages plus an IDE, and I actually enjoyed the lighter weight environment quite a bit.
Would I be even more productive in Ruby with an IDE? Possibly. But it's possible that more powerful languages lessen the need for an IDE. Your love of ACL for Common Lisp would be a counter data point, but it's only one data point. Well, Avi Bryant would tout the Squeak IDE as a great advantage in using Smalltalk. In my case, it's somewhat moot given the lack of IDEs for Ruby. As I develop more in Lisp, I'll be better able to judge the effectiveness of the available IDEs.
Tens of thousands of lines of Ruby haven't been a problem for me with just vim, and now Emacs, and I don't think hundreds of thousands of lines would be a problem either if designed well.
"I found I was much more productive in Ruby with a simple editor than I had been with other languages plus an IDE"
Bingo, and that is why we do not see fancy IDEs for agile languages. The corollary being horrid languages have great IDEs because lawdy we need something!
One thing going on here is reflection. If my language has that I can toss off my own rough IDE-ish hacks in minutes and then they do exactly what I want, too, so the demand just never develops for off-the-shelf IDEs.
I work with tens of KLOC of Common Lisp at a time. I like sitting in a backtrace and using a keychord to jump to a functions definition, or sitting in the inspector and jumping to a class definition in source or with a diffeent keychord to the class in a graphical class browser. ACL integrates everything (except, strangely "who calls?", tho that is available via an unexported function), so I just sail all over my big code bases as fast as I can think, click, and keychord. Some folks, btw, feel the same about Lispworks and Slime, we need an IDE smackdown some day to comapre. :)
"The first substantial barrier is Emacs. Before learning Lisp, first you must learn Emacs. I've tried several times, but keep deciding it's not worth the effort."
First of all, I don't think it's accurate to say that you must learn Emacs before learning Lisp. Other editors such as vi or IDEs such as ACL & LispWorks are used successfully.
On the other hand, after using IDEs for over a decade, I switched to vim for a couple of years and more recently switched to Emacs. Get the "Learning GNU Emacs" book and it will be trivial to pick up Emacs.
Sorry for the omission :) I did a couple years of C# development back on 2002, but for some reason the whole .NET area slipped my mind. I added C#, but I'll wait to add Visual Basic until someone has the courage to suggest it :)
Ah, I remember that too. Those innocent days where most of the problems were like "should I use 'print' or 'input' there ? What's the difference between them ?"
This is awesome. I wanted to submit a poll earlier and didn't find anything on the web that was what I wanted, so I was going to write a small Arc web app to do it, but haven't had time.
I'm kind of surprised there isn't more interest in this. Do people have other ways of dealing with the volume? I suppose I could just write a GreaseMonkey script, but it seems better to have it integrated with the forum.
Wouldn't you agree that it depends on what you're trying to do? If you want to read every comment, there is no problem. If you want to only read the 10% highest ranked comments, there is a problem. It's this problem I'm trying to solve, and I assumed others had the same problem. It's possible I was mistaken.
Oh, yeah, definitely. I'm just saying that there isn't enough traffic yet for the comments page to outpace my reading, although this will presumably change eventually.
