[antlr-interest] are ides a good thing? (was: Serious doubtsonusage of incrementalparsinginides)

[Anthony Youngman]

I work for an end user. There's only about 4 coders all told, and we
tend to work somewhat individually.

And I find I spend most of my time talking to the users, including quite
often asking the question "are you sure what you're asking for is
sensible" (a lot of our work is statistics).

So I almost invariably find, once I actually sit down to code, that the
basic design is pretty much all there. I rarely design while coding. And
some of my biggest projects have been refactoring other peoples'
programs that clearly evolved and weren't designed. The end result is
usually a program that is smaller and more feature-full.

I take your point about academe, but I don't work there, and I'd still
try and implement a lot of their ideas (not all :-). Take oo for example
- not that I do any of it at the moment but coding a
state-transition-table on paper almost certainly beats coding it in an
IDE. It's a lot harder to miss things by accident :-)

John Mitchell said I was unusual, in that I don't tend to "see" things
visually (he didn't put it that way). So I almost certainly see things
differently from you. But what I find interesting is an article (url is
dead unfortunately), where the author said he noticed that much of Unix
history is very verbal. And it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if
most of the top Linux hackers were verbal people...

(Oh - and yes I am a (very) abstract person. Didn't I say that
educational academics were surprised "recently" to discover that maybe
50% of people never make the cognitive leap from concrete to abstract
thought? :-)

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org
[mailto:antlr-interest-bounces at antlr.org] On Behalf Of Eduard Ralph
Sent: 27 April 2005 11:11
To: antlr-interest at antlr.org
Subject: [antlr-interest] are ides a good thing? (was: Serious
doubtsonusage of incrementalparsinginides)



But that still is a very poor argument against an IDE. An analogy would
be
something like: I don't use any electronic correction systems in my car,
because that makes me drive more reckless. The factor is still: use your
brain first.

You've recited a study from 1968 (which unfortunately I didn't have the
luxury of reading) which probably is a bad way to make your point,
because
technology has changed markedly since then. You've also indicated that
you
spend very little time doing implementation, so I would like to ask you:
have you ever implemented a piece of software that took 3 months or more
to
complete? Even if you only spend 20% of your time on it? I think you
would
find that your approach is slightly off synch with coding reality.

Greets,
Eddie

P.S.: I don't mean to get insulting, but your arguments to seem to imply
that you have a certain white tower syndrome. With that I mean that you
probably are very good at whatever abstract thing you do, but you seem
to be
a bit high browed about those ones of us, who actually make *things*. As
a
suggestion: try a project in the industry (best 4-10 people, 6-12 months
of
coding), you might find it an interesting different way to software
development.



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