Blogging Roller

Heck - I'd put it as #1 on my list - I developed without an IDE for *years*...

Posted by Matt Raible on May 14, 2003 at 04:07 PM EDT #

Keith, which IDE would that be? You may have noticed that nearly every java IDE these days supports using Ant to build projects from within the IDE. I don't know if anyone has tried reading or writing C++ code that uses hungarian notation, but that notation is a classic case for using an IDE. That, in turn, is also a classic case for why people have just stuck with text editors (because the IDE's have only recently started doing enough to be really really useful). In hungarian notation, every variable would have a prefix to describe it. This prefix, as I understand it, can identify the type of the variable (things like 32 bit integer, or hWnd for handle to a window), and the scope of a variable (global, class, parameter, etc). It also leads to problems with just plain butt ugly variable names (hwndItem), code maintainance issues if you ever change the type or scope of the variable (For an example of this, look at the documentation for wParam in Microsoft Windows 32-bit: It changed from a 16-bit value (w stands for word) to a 32-bit value (which should have been dwParam). -YS, source http://ootips.org/hungarian-notation.html), and real problems when people who aren't familiar with hungarian notation have to modify your code. The thing is, when you compile your code, the compiler figures out all this information on its own. So it would stand to reason that an IDE would also be able to figure this out, and display something that would tell you these things. It could display local, class, and static variables in different colors, or place an icon by the variable name. In C++, it could do the same thing with pointers and handles and the like. Display the class of the variable is a bit tougher, because there are an infinite number of classes possible, but it could display the primitive type (if it was a primitive), possibly have different signs to signify common class types (Collection, String, etc), and perhaps (this would definitely need some testing to decide if it could work) display the name of the class semi-transparently below and partially over the variable name wherever it occured. All of these things could be done by the IDE without alterting the source code whatsoever, and would probably help produce better code (or at least that's what the hungarian notation people always argued). I just think it would be handy. IDE's have started to provide very useful functionality lately (refactoring, code completion, and error highlighting) that allows you to write code much faster than you could with a plain text editor. And no, code wizards are not generally useful functionality. :-) However, although the above idea would probably add one more significant reason to use an IDE, no IDE's currently do this. One good reason that people have stuck with text editors for editing code is that IDE's haven't provided a great deal of useful additional functionality. It's only been in the last couple of years that IDE's have started doing things that they should have been able to do a long long time ago (like renaming a variable or method and having the IDE search and replace every reference to that variable or method name with the new name). Eclipse allows you to automatically have prefixes placed on variables due to their scope when you beautify the code or something, but I don't really want to have to unnecessarily type extra letters when I use a variable. So again, an IDE could provide a pretty useful feature here, pretty easily. But again, it doesn't.

Posted by Paul Rivers on May 15, 2003 at 04:15 PM EDT #

I know, I meant to write a small comment...but I sorta got carried away. I actually emailed a link to the comment to an english professor I know, because it started to look like a small essay. :-) Ironically, I've actually developed my own blogging software for that same professor (I would have liked to use Roller, but he needed multiple categories and a primary category, and Roller didn't have it, and was being transitioned from Castor to Hibernate at the time). Anyways, here I go again, only this post isn't nearly as entertaining. I'd start my own blog, but I doubt it would get read as much as yours. :-)

Posted by Paul Rivers on May 17, 2003 at 03:39 AM EDT #