Manifesto for Integrated Development Environments
- by Hugo S Ferreira
Have you recently take a peek at Coda, or Espresso, or Textmate? Or even Google Chrome's Developer Tools? They are well designed, intuitive, interface rich, and extensible. But Coda, Espresso or Textmate, among several, are text editors, not IDEs. On the other side, VIM and Emacs live in the last century, and Eclipse is an overbloated platform. This is more like an outcry for a decent, common infrastructure for REAL IDEs. But there's some questions attached: (i) what features are needed for such a product and (ii) what products are out there that could fullfil this need, and what are they missing. So here's my draft for a manifesto:
Manifesto for Integrated Development Environments:
We favor interactivity and productivity over syntax and tools.
We favor inline, contextual documentation over man and html files.
We favor high-definition, graphic-capable color screens over 80x25 character terminals.
We favor the use of advanced input schemas over unintuitive keyboard shortcuts.
We favor a common, extensible and customizable infrastructure over unmaintained chaintools.
We know the difference between search&replace and refactoring.
We know the difference between integrated debugging support over a terminal window.
We know the difference between semantic-aware code-completion over dumb textual templates.
We favor the usage of standards like (E)BNF.
