One of my main issues with the current mainstream environments is that they encourage developers to jump into coding, and during said coding produce an invalid impression that the code being written is somehow ‘isolated’ from the rest of the system (the box around the text you’re actually looking at in your editor).
In turn, this is based on a paradigm that’s no more complicated than ‘Developers write code, in a text editor, and store it in files.’
Despite the current fad for ‘dark’ themed UI’s, most developers will understand the difference between ‘green on black’ and ‘blue on white’ tools. The former have the advantage of being written for developers (even developers don’t expect anyone else to use the console). However they don’t scale — my last project had 1.9m lines of code (fortunately, not mostly written by me), how do you fit that in an 80x25 character console?
The latter have the double disadvantage of being written as if for end users (I’m a developer, I want query panes in every tool, not click buttons), and in most cases being much more than a very slow, resource intensive text editor + file manager in any case, with a few (dis) integrated tools thrown in on the side.
Surely we can think through a problem before typing our way directly towards a hell of our own making.
And since we’re tool makers, surely we can build tools that reflect the reality of our experience, such as the very simple reality that we spend less than 25% of our time ‘writing code’, the rest is reading code we need to understand, and debugging code that doesn’t work, either our own or someone else’s.
Pharo is an example of a truly integrated development environment. I don’t expect, nor even want everyone to become a Smalltalk developer — it would likely result in the disruptive tendencies that affect non-niche environments.
But it is a good example of what can be done. And the full environment, with more capabilities than Eclipse or IdeaJ, uses less resources than Sublime Text with no files loaded … btw, the ‘Sublime’, as defined by Hegel, is peculiarly appropriate when applied to the editor — ‘The night where all cows are black.’
