Subject: KDevelop vs. Eclipse vs. Emacs

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:22:58 +0300

Currently I use emacs and makefiles to develop code in projects, which
use C++, Python and PHP.
I am considering whether to switch to a "true" IDE, such as KDevelop or
Eclipse.

What is the community's opinion about IDEs?
Any other Free Software IDEs I overlooked?
Which IDE is, in your opinion, better and for which language/s?

                                 --- Omer

-- 
MS-Windows is the Pal-Kal of the PC world.
My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/

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---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:45:11 +0300

> What is the community's opinion about IDEs?

I'm not currently using an IDE. I'm primarily working on Perl, C (mostly ANSI 
C), and Bash code, with the occasional code in other languages. And I'm using 
gvim for that.

It is possible that for languages such as Java or C++, an IDE would be a 
better idea than using vim or Emacs. However, I don't work with them often 
enough to judge.

Back when I did a lot of work on PHP I was looking for a good PHP development 
environment:

http://shlomif.livejournal.com/9789.html

But I ended up sticking with gvim.

> Any other Free Software IDEs I overlooked?

Well, there's Anjuta:

http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/

It only supports C and C++, and not as mature as KDevelop is.

> Which IDE is, in your opinion, better and for which language/s?

Well, I was told Eclipse or its equivalents is best for Java. Don't know what 
is best for C and C++.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [email-masked]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

If it's not in my E-mail it doesn't happen. And if my E-mail is saying
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    -- An Israeli Linuxer

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From: "Omer Shapira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 08:43:28 -0700

Is this a holy war?

-- 
Sincerely Yours,
Omer Shapira

---

From: Omer Zak <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:43:37 +0300

This is off-topic to the topic which I raised, and to which people
answered only by replying to someone else, who had different issues.

However, the topic of religious (or holy) wars in this context is an
interesting topic to explore at its own right, so I'm accepting the
challenge.

It seems to me that religious wars are about choice between two (or
more) approaches, which are more or less equivalent - but require some
time investment to switch from one to the other.

The famous example of vi vs. emacs religious war illustrates this point.
Both editors are powerful text editors, and both have some sort of
scripting capabilities.  However, to switch from one to the other
requires some time investment - to learn the other editor, to cultivate
different mental habits, to re-create one's personal list of scripts,
tips, riffs and shortcuts.

However, people typically do not defend their editor choices by invoking
the expense of conversion to the other editor.  They prefer to invent
all kinds of arguments to justify their original editor choice, made 10
years ago.

                                --- Omer

-- 
My Commodore 64 is suffering from slowness and insufficiency of memory;
and its display device is grievously short of pixels.  Can anyone help?
My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 11:37:05 +0300

On Sun, Sep 02, 2007, Omer Zak wrote about "Religious Wars (was: Re: [hackers-il] KDevelop vs. Eclipse vs.?Emacs)":
>..

I don't fully agree. Such "wars" indeed exist, but are faught mainly by
trolls, who, for example, pop up on a Linux list and start debating whether
you should use Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu, when everyone knows that these are
basically permutations of more-or-less the same features, and if choice X
has some feature not in choice Y, then the next version of choice Y will surely
have it, and some new feature that X doesn't have.

The wars become more interesting, and more "religious", when the choices
are not equivalent, and both sides acklowedge specific differences between
the two choices - they just can't agree if the difference is good, or bad.

In real religions, for example, everyone agrees that a major difference between
Judaism and Christianity is Jesus Christ - it's just that Christians think
this is a *good* thing in christianity, and Jews think it's a *bad* thing.
Similarly, in software,

> scripting capabilities.  However, to switch from one to the other

Actually, the VI/Emacs religious war broke out and continued when there was
a real difference between those editor's philosophy. Emacs indeed had powerful
scripting capabilities, but vi had none (it had a simple configuration file,
~/.exrc, but you couldn't call that scripting by a longshot). Emacs' camp
thought this made Emacs obviously better, while vi's camp disagreed and
ridiculed Emacs' scripting (saying things like "Emacs is a great operating
system, but it's missing a good editor). A second "religious" argument
between the vi and emacs camps was the style of keyboard binding. The vi
camp believed in "modal" binding (you have insert mode, and command mode)
and in combinations of single-key commands, while the emacs camp believed
in global binding (a key does the same thing everywhere) and key combinations
(liek control-alt-a). Each camp thought the other's method sucks.

Of course, these VI/Emacs wars are a thing of the 80s. Today, both XEmacs
and Vim have GUIs and scripting languages, and the differences between the
two editors are indeed starting to look cosmetic, rather than fundumental.
Both editors are starting to look like operating systems, rather than
editors ;-)

> tips, riffs and shortcuts.

This doesn't explain the "holy war" aspect. If I have a lot of scripts and
knowledge about program X, why would that automatically send me to mailing
lists and write that Y sucks?

I think that I would write that Y sucks, only when I believe Y really sucks,
i.e., not only am I used to X, but there are significant differences between
X and Y which - at least to me - don't look like something consmetic or
"what I'm used to", but rather very important differences.

For example, as you probably know, I use zsh. I settled on zsh as my favorite
shell around 15 years ago - after having previously used ksh and bourne shell.
While Zsh is my favorite shell, I have nothing really bad to say about Bash.
It doesn't suck - it's probably great, just isn't as great as zsh ;-) So you
won't catch me slandering bash in mailing lists and joining crusades against
it. On the other hand, I do think that csh sucks, and can explain my reasoning.
I *will* join any crusade against csh that you invite me to... Because I
believe that csh is really inferior to zsh (and bash) - it's not just a
historic choice - and I don't want newbies to fall into the trap of learning
it.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Wednesday, Sep  5 2007, 22 Elul 5767
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |The path of least resistance is what
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |makes rivers and politicians crooked.

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From: "Omer Shapira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 16:14:35 -0700

"a trap of learning". Touche.

On 9/5/07, Nadav Har'El <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>   On Sun, Sep 02, 2007, Omer Zak wrote about "Religious Wars (was: Re:
> [hackers-il] KDevelop vs. Eclipse vs.?Emacs)":
> >..
> [email-masked] <nyh%40math.technion.ac.il>|-----------------------------------------

-- 
Sincerely Yours,
Omer Shapira

---

From: "Omer Shapira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2007 16:26:03 -0700

A true religious war - and this is my humble opinion - requires common use
cases, yet different postulates. In addition, some decent amount of people
wishing to invest their time and efforts into the war must be present -
otherwise, the war will fall into oblivion.

Qualities, that person willing to succeed in the religious war should
pertain, in my humble^W arrogant (a la guerre comme a la guerre) opinion,
are mental rigidity and unwillingness to separate between the cause, the
aims and the means.

As one vague familiar with dialectics of materialism, I prefer to remain
atheist in all what is related to tools and means, yet I do have one sound
opinion:

        Mediocre software may be profitable, but it is boring and ultimately
bad for the developers.

And if we will return to the original question, from which this current
thread was forked, let me say that both vim and GNU Emacs had been polished
into state which is very close to the perfection, yet KDevelop and XEmacs
still have some way to go up the path of perpetual self-improvement.

-- 
Sincerely Yours,
Omer Shapira