[Ocaml-biz] IDEs

[Brian Hurt]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

> Brian Hurt wrote:
> >
> > I want to ask what changes you think need to be made- to gnu emacs,
> > Xemacs, or vim?
> 
> Vim doesn't have the critical mass of users that Emacs does, either in
> OCaml-land or any other land.  As a Windows guy looking at different
> available editors, I see no technical advantage Vim has whatsoever over
> Emacs.  Vim is just as difficult to learn as Emacs.  Thus, in my book,
> Vim loses on popularity.  All other factors being equal, if one product
> has huge deployment, support community, and lotsa developers, and the
> other doesn't, you go with the popular horse.

Bwuh?

In my experience is that vi/emacs users are split about 50/50.  I do not 
know of any actual user surveys.  Vi is a little more popular among 
sysadmins, emacs a little more popular among developers- so among the 
target market, it may be 40% vi/60% emacs.  Maybe.  More likely 48% vi/52% 
emacs.  If you seperate out Xemacs vr.s Gnu emacs, it'll probably be more 
like 40/40/10 vi/gnu/xemacs.

Emacs has more *developers* writting emacs lisp scripts for it.  But this 
is because vi doesn't have a built-in equivelent scripting language.  And 
before you start talking about emacs using it's "superior" user base to 
supplant vi, remember that it hasn't succeeded to any signifigant degree 
in 25 years.  The emacs vr.s vi religous war has become a joke.  You're 
right in that neither has a signifigant technical advantage over the 
other.  But they also play nice together.  Every company I've ever worked 
for has had a mix of emacs and vi users, and it never caused a problem 
that I noticed (mixing visual studio and either emacs or vi is a problem, 
tho).

But you didn't answer my question: right this second, what's wrong with 
either emacs or vi (any versions thereof) that needs to be fixed?  They 
both edit ocaml code every bit as well as they edit C code.  Ditto for 
joe, jove, jed, micro-emacs, pico, cat, ...

> But, let's
> hear it before choosing to champion Vim.  Again, this isn't about
> whether some specific individual should choose or avoid Vim.
> Individuals should do what they like.  This is about whether Vim is a
> best-of-breed tool for commercial, mission critical software.  We should
> only be pushing the best, because our job of showcasing OCaml is very,
> very hard.

What editor you use shouldn't even come up when discussing programming 
languages.  Nothing turns me off to a language faster than learning you 
need to use the special language environment for that language.  They're 
text files.  If you want to use notepad, that should work.

My point in this isn't that the choice of emacs over vi is wrong, it's 
that *choosing* between emacs and vi is wrong.  Especially considering 
that in many places, the debate isn't emacs vr.s vi, but vs vr.s wsad.  
Even in those areas where emacs vr.s vi is the debate, choosing one over 
the other will simply alienate a signifigant fraction of developers.

-- 
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                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian