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Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?


From: Richard Riley
Subject: Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?
Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:33:35 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.110011 (No Gnus v0.11) Emacs/23.2 (gnu/linux)

Elena <egarrulo@gmail.com> writes:

> On Dec 6, 4:31 pm, Richard Riley <rile...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> >> Programming is heavily concerned by drudge tasks, unless someone has
>> >> come up with ways to automate them.
>>
>> > Your world of programming then is very different from mine.
>>
>> > I've only worked on Free Software projects (some of them linked to
>> > academic research, others not), so maybe I'm biased or blind, but really
>> > if the amount of "drudge tasks" is so high, it would seem to me that you
>> > probably have a real problem elsewhere which would be better solved by
>> > eliminating those tasks completely rather then by automating them
>> > via IDEs.
>>
>> >         Stefan
>>
>> The features in IDEs are generally there for a reason. So clearly people
>> do need them. Things like completions, context help, project dependency
>> handling, task management etc are all samples of what are "better at
>> hand" inside the main coding environment. Emacs does a lot well, but
>> things like completion, code navigation, context help etc it is
>> poor. That said it makes up for it in otherways e.g org-mode is a super
>> development aid.
>
> What I think those who dismiss IDEs fail to realize is that IDEs are
> just frameworks for developing applications; these frameworks have
> been laid out by more experienced programmers after a lot of
> experience on big projects.  The editor embedded in Emacs is a
> framework too: a framework for text editing.  Even if you don't go out
> of your way to customize Emacs, you can use vanilla Emacs' editing
> framework and be sure that it has been laid down by programmers after
> decades of experience editing texts of all kinds.  Saying that you
> should craft your own IDE on Emacs from scratch is akin to say that
> you should craft your own editing environment from scratch.

A lot of people spend a lot of time configuring emacs to BE an IDE. And
it could be a best of breed one. There are enough initiatives out
there. But each time you use anew language you often need to start from
scratch again - I had hoped cedet might address that to a degree and it
still might. Certainly tags are certainly not good enough these days
when you compare the features of VS or Eclipse. One of the most commonly
asked questions on #emacs is "how do I get completion" working for
example. It gets more complicated when you start looking at mixed mode
programming and bring nxhtml into the equation. The lines between things
like auto-complete, hippy expand and cedets OWN completion UIs is often
a hurdle for many : this is the nature of the beast - people keep
reinventing their own versions of things rather than coming to a
concensus on using one in order to make it easier for the end user. That
said this same choice leads to improvements in many things. But as a
programming editor I suspect its losing ground more and more - certainly
where it comes to python, java and mixed mode programming
(php/html/etc) and it strikes me that fewer and fewer people are using
gud/gdb despite it being a very powerful solution.






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