[antlr-interest] Serious doubts on usage of incremental parsinginides

[Anthony Youngman]

Are ides even a good thing? :-)

Working in Visual Studio (iirc) it won't even let me make "mistakes",
which is real pain in the neck when I'm half-way through typing
something and then need to go off and check something. As soon as I take
focus away from the line, it is checked, and if there's an error the
line grabs focus again. BLOODY ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY :-)

And, I think it was IBM's work, it has been shown that code that is
written and checked WITHOUT the aid of a computer tends to work better
than code that has been written interactively. I *much* prefer working
on paper - it's far easier to have an overview over the entire project -
and all these fancy tools get in the way.

I guess, actually, it's the visual/abstract dichotomy. I gather the
educational world got a bit of a shock "recently". It's always been
accepted that kids go through developmental stages. The last major
transition is from concrete to abstract thought, and it's always been
assumed that this happens about age 14, give or take a few years. Recent
research seems to show that maybe *half* of people never make this
transition.

It's my guess that people who do make this transition are far less
reliant on visuals or, like me, actually tend to positively *dislike*
visuals. It's my belief (and experience) that ides make life easier for
the average guy, but that the *good* programmer does even better without
one.

Not that I do much nowadays, but I'd typically do loads of work, then a
build/fix/build/fix cycle. An ide (such as emacs :-) doesn't gain me
much. But something (such as VS) that actively forces me to think in
"nuts and bolts" mode all the time is an active hindrance - and it does
it in the name of making me more productive!

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org
[mailto:antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Scott Stanchfield
Sent: 25 April 2005 01:50
To: 'Prashant Deva'; antlr-interest at antlr.org
Subject: RE: [antlr-interest] Serious doubts on usage of incremental
parsinginides

Ummm... that's what eclipse does, and it's amazingly fast.

First, there are two concepts here:

1) incremental compilation
2) editor parsing for decoration & "instant errors"

Have you tried running a full build of anything recently? Most large
projects take several minutes (3-5 at least) or more. The incremental
building in eclipse has probably saved me a good year of development
time
since it came out... (And I'm not kidding... If I had to go back to
rebuilding by hand every once in a while, then figure out the context of
each error, I'd go nuts...)



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