The importance of a good IDE: which one to choose (and why)?
A few months ago, when I was trying to start developing for maemo, I discovered a project called ESbox. ESbox is "an Eclipse Ganymede-based product that helps programmers to develop applications for Maemo platform using Scratchbox Apophis". It launches scratchbox transparently, includes wizards for different types of apps, lets you debug step by step and on device, and also uses C/C++ or Python plugins, so you can refactor code, jump to variable declarations, explore types, autocomplete...
I don't know exactly when it was, but I once came to maemo IRC channel to ask a specific (maybe too specific) question about ESbox. I was surprised that nobody was using it: people there were using nano, vi, Emacs... I asked them about all the features a "full IDE" offers: what about code refactoring? what about autocompletion? debugging? While some said that you can get emacs to auto-complete from a given dictionary, the other questions remained unanswered. In fact, I almost felt like we weren't talking the same language.
Our discussion wasn't constructive at all: I don't know if it was the language barrier, if it was me who said something inappropriate in the beginning, or if I met people too "Taliban". The thing is that I had to listen things like "real programmers know the name of the functions / methods they need: autocompletion is for dumbs". And no, it wasn't a joke like "real programmers develop their own device drivers". So I gave up and left the channel: I assumed that programmers would choose their IDEs according to the kind of development they were doing, so "hobbyists" would use nano, would copy & paste and wouldn't care too much about extras, and "professionals" would use others, or at least would know and use the extras I wanted. And time went by.
As I was telling you in the last post, this Friday we've got our first session in the Desktop & Mobile development module of the master. After its presentation, we had a brainstorming to choose which app we will be developing during the workshops, and then... we started talking about IDEs. More specifically, Emacs.
That gave me the opportunity to confirm that there really was a difference between professional developers and non-professional, and that my worries were really shared by others. It was a really interesting chat, where we were explained the environment, from the basics (navigation a buffer, open, close, kill and yank...) to more complex things: debugger integration, syntax highlighting modules, autocompletion, macros...
After the session, I now can understand other people not using Eclipse or Netbeans, while still being productive. I'm not going to use Emacs, not yet, as it looked like some of the features that "just work" in Eclipse require some fiddling in Emacs; but at least I know that someone using Emacs and mastering it will be as efficient as an Eclipse user -or even more.
Still, when I think about the things I like to have working in Eclipse, the following comes:
- Version control: I'd like to be able to check history, undo changes across revisions, commit changes, check "who did what" (blame)
- Debugging: Set breakpoints, set conditional breakpoints, step by step debugging, variable inspection
- Syntax highlighting, code folding, autocompletion (preferable if it can include code I've done, not only know APIs), code refactoring (variable names, methods, etc), comment & uncomment.
- Compilation management: Make integration (or other options like ant or maven for Java). Build automatically, "live" syntax error detection.
- Bug tracking system integration
- GUI editor
I know that I can do all of the above using Eclipse, and since this Friday I know that some of them are also possible with Emacs, so now I'd like to have some feedback:
What do you expect in an IDE? Is your list similar to mine? What is your IDE of choice? Which special options of your IDE you use the most? Which options are you most proud of?