As I have mentioned before, I am a cli guy. I honestly cannot imagine getting through a day without using the terminal. Drag and drop is all well and fine, but wildcard support and iteration in the shell is hard to do in finder (or explorer or nautilus or konqueror etc). That being said, I can see the benefit of many of the things that a modern IDE supplies. I am a big fan of Emacs, but the bells and whistles are very alluring.
I have some specific and interesting needs due to the variety of tools I have used to cobble together my solutions to problems that I have had in the past. Domain specific languages have filled many needs in these problems, so I need a lot of different syntaxes highlighted.
As an example of a more or less typical project I will describe my project assignment tools. The problem is assigning projects to students for our project subject. The idea is that each lecturer comes up with a couple of project proposals, the students choose their top 10 (in order) and a program then matches projects to students by minimising the “unhappiness” while obeying constraints on how many students each lecturer should get etc.
The process uses the following components, held together by a Makefile:
- To allow the students to specify their projects, we use an Excel spreadsheet that verifies that their choices are valid etc. They fill in the project selection spreadsheet and e-mail it to us.
- A Python script reads and compiles these spreadsheets into a table
- A second Python script converts this table into a MathProg data file
- GLPK is used to solve the problem (specified using MathProg)
- Unix tools (grep, sed, awk, join, tr, xargs) are used to massage the run results
- The massaged results are processed by python to generate an HTML file
- The HTML file is coloured using CSS
The parameters of the optimisation will be tuned and the optimisation re-run many times. I will also need to answer many questions about specific students based on names or student numbers, which is easily obtained by grepping the intermediate results generated by the above process. These are the reasons why a single Python program doing the above would be a lot larger than the current files are: I would need to implement persistence and memoisation to avoid rerunning lots of code (which is currently handled by make), in addition to coding querying interfaces to allow queries of the results.
But back to IDEs. My ideal IDE does not force me to use one language for everything. It supports my use of domain specific languages by at least colouring the code, but ideally providing intelligent indentation, bracket matching and language help. It allows complex code refactoring and is aware of scope and different senses of variables. A debugger is a plus, but because I mostly use dynamic languages, I find I use the debugger infrequently. A last hurdle is that I either need the same program on both of the platforms I use (mac and linux) or use a scheme for projects that doesn’t break when the project is edited by another program (plays well with others).
Much of what I’ve described is delivered by Emacs. It has code highlighting, tabbing and bracket matching for almost every language ever developed. It also has debugging and refactoring for python via interaction with pdb and rope, although I will admit it’s not as slick as some modern IDEs.
After hearing a lot of people rave about the advantages of IDEs I have decided to give them another shot. So far I have installed Eclipse and Netbeans, as they both run under Mac and Linux. I will be posting some of my experiences here. Please leave a comment if you have some suggestions I should try out. I am really keen to boost my productivity, so I won’t shoot down any suggestions out of and (except that I have tried vi and didn’t like it that much).
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