[ardour-dev] File Extensions and Preprocessor stuff

[Paul Davis]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 16:05 +0200, Bengt Gördén wrote:
> onsdag 02 maj 2007 15:35 skrev Fons Adriaensen:
> > On Wed, May 02, 2007 at 08:39:22AM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> > > I've been writing code for more than 20 years and I haven't yet seen a
> > > single piece of functionality in an IDE that outweighs the costs of
> > > trying to use them.
> >
> > Same here. And what could any IDE add to what scons already does ?
> 
> Ones I was talking to John Postel in an IETF meeting. We sat in the terminal 
> room. I saw him browsing his mailbox with "more <mailbox>". I asked him why. 
> He looked at my mail client (mh I think it was at that time) and said almost 
> the exact words that you do. What can "mh" add to what "more" does?

ow! OWWW! ouch! wow, thats a cruel riposte! can there possibly be a come
back? well ....

the only possible response i can think of is that mh does allow
different sorts of your messages, and can hide worthless headers.
moreover, when i used to use mh, it actually used more(1) as my default
message pager, so there is an existence proof that it must add
something :) mh also stored each message as a single file, which allowed
you to use mv, rm, grep and other tools, so it definitely expanded the
toolbox over "more <mailbox>" ....

by contrast, i haven't seen a function in an IDE that i can't replicate
either closely or exactly enough using emacs. in exchange for that, you
get a system that has to "know" a lot of stuff about your project, and
frequently makes life really hard for people who want to use a different
tool. i've seen entire build systems structured around functionality
provided by an IDE - anyone who wanted to use a different editor was
immediately screwed.

--p