[Ocaml-biz] IDEs

[Brandon J. Van Every]

William Neumann wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> > I will get back to you at a later time why I don't think
> > Vim's support of OCaml is as good as the Emacs support.
>
> Please do so now.

I cannot do so now.  I don't know the answer, and it is too much work to
figure out the answer right now.  I only know that I downloaded XEmacs,
downloaded GVim, and downloaded GNU Emacs, in that order.  I put at
least a week into dinking with these, if not longer.  The first 2 were
superficially easier to use on Windows than GNU Emacs, due to more GUI
eye candy and Windows cut-copy-paste bindings.  But once you had to
actually *do* something, like configure for OCaml, all had steep
learning curves.  I scratched my head trying to find a class browser for
OCaml.  Something called tuareg-mode was available and would require a
bunch of learning.  I got CUA mode working on GNU Emacs so that I'd have
cut-copy-paste sanity, and it worked.  That's about when I wore out and
started reading OCaml docs over and over again, making pen-and-paper
designs for AI things I was going to need.

My provisional answer certainly is, from a Visual Studio developer's
standpoint, they all completely, utterly, totally suck.  I figured GNU
Emacs would be easiest to swallow with some discipline, given my ancient
XEmacs background.  GNU Emacs apparently had more OCaml-related tools
available for it than Vim.  I'm going to go up the Eclipse learning
curve before I bother to resolve which of GNU Emacs or Vim is marginally
superior.

I'm already certain that GNU Emacs is superior to XEmacs due to
developer support and *.el compatibility issues.  I read the entire
archive of the historic GNU Emacs / XEmacs 'split' debate to understand
the lay of the land.  And I looked at what they had to offer, broadly
speaking, in more modern times.  I think the historic advantage of
'XEmacs has a GUI' is gone.  GNU Emacs has a GUI nowadays and it's just
fine.

> No, I think most of us are just disinterested in hearing you drone on
> and on.

As a meta point, feel free to speak up on anything you like.  My
experience on every mailing list I've ever been on, is the 'sit back and
discuss less' crowd *NEVER* gets anything done.  Excessive verbiage may
be annoying, but as far as getting plans moving, it's what works.  You
either engage or you don't.  I don't care how you engage, just that you
engage.

Another point: when I make a strong statement about something, it is not
set in stone, unless I explicitly say so.  Don't confuse strength of
statement for inflexibility.  Often I will make a strong statement to
get people to react and engage.  If someone argues successfully for both
Emacs and Vi, fine, Emacs and Vi.  Long as they do the support work.
But it cannot be Emacs, Vi, and every other crufty text editor that has
ever been invented under the UNIX sun.  Of that, I am certain and not
budging.  The decision cannot be "an unwillingness to make decisions."


Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

When no one else sells courage, supply and demand take hold.