[Ocaml-biz] IDEs

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Olivier Grisel wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every a écrit :
>
> I prefer vim but I don't want to restart the emacs vs vim flame war
> again and again.

My goal was mainly to draw at least *one* Vim and XEmacs supporter into
the discussion.  Congrats, like a catheter you are so drawn.  :-)

> To my mind, people using advanced editors like vim or emacs can take
> care of customization by them-selves.

One could use the word 'advanced', or one could use the word
'difficult'.  I think there are 2 issues here.  (1) Installed base,
meaning programmers who are already using Emacs or Vim.  (2) People to
be converted from some other C++, Java, or C# environment.

I must say, getting Visual Studio users to move to any of Emacs, XEmacs,
or Vim is an awfully hard sell.  I've downloaded all of 'em, dinked with
all of 'em, and am *still* dragging my feet about it.  I've spent years
building up my VS skills.  Now I am asked to switch, just so I can use
OCaml?

The problem is, all 3 of these editors have a "UNIX mastery" culture
attached to them.  You want to do anything, you're going to have to dig
down into the docs and learn a lot of keystrokes.  The Vim documentation
is rather explicit about the philosophy.  "Vim is not here to hold your
hand, it is a tool to be mastered" or some such.  Well, for all this
'mastery' crap, I say no thanks!

And, I *have* an ancient Linux background.  I've *used* plain old vi on
VMS mainframes.  I used to use XEmacs back in Linux days.  So I gave up
on Vim and said, ok, at least my fingers have got some muscle memory for
C-x C-f, if not my brain anymore.  I found CUA mode and that made GNU
Emacs much nicer, I've now got Windows-style cut-copy-paste keystrokes
working seamlessly.  *With* C-x C-f at the same time, it's clever.  I'm
quite happy with GNU Emacs as a Notepad replacement, it's much better.

But there's all this other shit.  I *still* haven't written more than a
line of OCaml in an interactive shell, because of this UNIX editor
learning curve.  I keep pushing it farther and farther back on the list
of things TODO.  Easier to design game rules, design low-level C AI
architectures, get Autoconf working with MSVC, make business plans,
evaluate tools, even fix my car whose rear windshield was smashed by a
burglar yesterday morning.  And I haven't fixed my car yet, because I
don't want to deal with it.  *Anything* to avoid the UNIX editor
learning curve.  I simply hate the idea, it totally turns me off.  I'll
swallow it only out of sheer discipline.

The vast majority of Visual Studio users feel exactly the same way I do,
only much moreso, and they lack the Linux background I actually have.

I had hoped that Cameleon might be farther along.  Too bad the author
says it isn't, and that it won't be a good tool on Windows.

I hope the Eclipse stuff is good.  I am sooo ready to bolt from the UNIX
editor realm.

Call me a Windows crybaby if you like.  It's exactly like if you'd been
using Emacs and Makefiles for years and years and years, and you were
forced to switch to Visual Studio.  Most programmers *hate* the tools
they don't know already.  It's a bunch of tedious unproductive headache
just to get to square one again, when you were already productive
before.

> Don't expect a regular vim user to
> switch to emacs just for ocaml programming. The converse
> holds too, I guess.

Yes, it's so true.

> We'd better concentrate on true and mature IDE integration
> like eclipse

What is your definition of "true and mature?"  Do you think even GNU
Emacs isn't good enough to do commercial OCaml work in?

> and see how it can be integrated with cross platform ocaml
> build tools
> such as omake for instance. It looks like Eclipse is becomming the
> definitive cross-platform IDE for many companies.

If it's any good for OCaml, I sure hope so.  Also it would be a good way
to expose the Java crowd to OCaml.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed McKenzie