[Ocaml-biz] IDEs

[William D. Neumann]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

>> BTW:  I'm not being snarky here.
>
> Yes, you are.  And I'm not going to turn this list into your personal
> battleground with me.

I suppose it would have been better to say I'm not *just* being snarky 
here.  It's a serious question -- you sling around a lot of statements 
voiced with authority, even on topics you've later been forced to admit 
you know little to nothing about.  Why should we believe you have anymore 
knowledge about "what business wants" than you do on the state of OCaml 
support in common UNIX text editors or coding in OCaml?

And I haven't turned it into my personal battleground with you.  If 
someone else spouts off on a topic I can tell they're BSing about, I'll 
call them out as well.  Especially if they do it with your kind of zeal -- 
Newton's third law of motion comes to mind here.

>> OK.  Then tell me in less than a week, what's better?
>> JBuilder, eclipse,
>> intelliJ, WebSphere, or JDeveloper.  These products, along
>> with Java are
>> pretty well industrialized, wouldn't you say?
>
> Too aggressive a review schedule for me personally.  Why don't you?  It
> is, after all, your list of products... we would certainly stand to
> benefit from your knowledge of them.  I presume you already have some
> answers here?

Wow!  I'm not sure you could have missed the point any more had you tried.

You stated:
> When you industrialize something, you get rid of these problems.  If I
> have to spend a week figuring out which tool is better, it is *way* too
> long.

I provided a counter-example to this claim with a set of well known, 
professional, commercial, mostly closed-source tools for a *highly* 
industrialized language that would take well over a week for a company to 
choose amongst.  Similar examples could be made with with databases, HR 
software, payroll systems, and yes, even programming languages and 
hardware. Yet you somehow think I want you to actually choose "the best 
one".  I don't give a damn which is the best one, I was trying to show 
that businesses have to make these kinds of decisions all the time. 
Having to decide between competing development environments for Java has 
hardly impeded its industrialization -- in fact, I would guess that it's 
helped because it keeps the eggs well distributed amongst a number of 
baskets (and no, I didn't just ask you to go buy eggs).

William D. Neumann

---

"Well I could be a genius, if I just put my mind to it.
And I...I could do anything, if only I could get 'round to it.
Oh we were brought up on the space-race, now they expect you to clean toilets.
When you've seen how big the world is, how can you make do with this?
If you want me, I'll be sleeping in - sleeping in throughout these glory days."

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