A good IDE
is worth its weight in gold...
Now, this should be obvious, but it isn't until
the day you are forced to use a crappy IDE. When it comes to software
development, I'm from the old school. Not the old, old school of punch cards and
dip switches, but the newer old school with command line building and debugging
through printfs. I've realized that I have become soft in my advancing years.
I've spent most of the last 11 years
of my career doing my development in Visual Studio (and its earlier versions).
Now, I'm fairly platform agnostic as a rule. During that time, I've also written
software for Linux in Java and the Macintosh as well. Eclipse and VisualAge were
decent enough IDEs that I didn't feel hampered. However, the leading IDE on the
mac until recently was CodeWarrior. CodeWarrior has an long history. It's been
around for a long time and you would think that as development environments go,
it should be one of the best considering it became the main development tool for
Mac OS development. I have no idea why though. It sucks. I mean, it really
sucks. At first I thought it was just the shock of the new. I was just having to
adjust to a new environment, but no, I've been using it for 18 months now and I
still hate it.
Luckily (or unluckily)
Apple is basically forcing all those who want to write software for OS X to
switch to XCode. I've only just started using it, so my observations are
premature. In general, it seems quite good and well designed. It does have some
significant quirks and weirdness though. Apple seems really interested in making
it better, so here is hoping...
Posted: Wed - September 21, 2005 at 08:02 PM
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