I guess it’s not a secret that there’s no such thing as a universal recipe. I find that this can be applied to pretty much everything, including software development. The good thing is that this approach promotes diversity. One simple example would be to compare the variety of IDEs for Linux vs Windows. Now, of course the question that comes to mind in Windows world is “why would I try to use different IDEs if I’m happy with Visual Studio”. Well, I would probably agree, provided that the development is based on Microsoft technologies. Of course it’s a different story if we’re talking about Java. Looks like Eclipse is the king there. However, when we move to the Linux world, the whole paradigm seems to be different due to one significant difference: there is no such thing as Visual Studio for Linux. Yes, I would agree that Eclipse is somewhat filling that niche, however, there is so much more variety that it’s almost impossible not to look at the alternatives. The project I’m working on right now is a relatively small website. Nothing too fancy, but I’m kind of enjoying the process that’s very new to me, namely lack of WYSIWYG editing. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy working with VS and all the contextual help and switching between source and design modes are extremely convenient, but I find the other side of that is that it promotes a certain laziness, especially when it comes to HTML. Is it crucial? Probably not, but it took me almost a day to remember all the usual HTML/Javascript specifics that I didn’t have to memorize before thanks to Visual Studio assisted development model. You may object by mentioning that I’m not forced to use visual tools when I’m working in Visual Studio and technically you would be correct. However I find that if it’s there and it works the way it should and allows you to do the same job faster, then you may as well utilize it. Once again, I’m not blaming it on the tool (Visual Studio), but rather on human nature.
Now on the Linux side of things I’ve decided to try something new and ended up using Geany. So far I’m happy with it and the most important thing that it is fast. I remember when I had Windows XP installed on the same computer, it took somewhere between 30 seconds and 1 minute to load the Visual Studio 2005 and that is considering that OS theme support was switched off. Geany,on the other hand, loads almost instantaneously. Yes, it may not have all the functionality of Visual Studio, but let’s honestly ask ourselves – how crucial are all those features that are packed into it? I would estimate that there are certain menus in Visual Studio which at least 50% of developers have no idea about. Is it their fault? I don’t think so. At the same time, considering the price point it becomes a very interesting situation when in many cases you end up spending extra money for certain features that at the end of the day you will never use.
Tags: Linux, Software Development, Windows
Your brain is using muscles it forgot how to flex. In no time at all, you’ll hardly miss some of those old VS assists as they’ll come as naturally to you as breathing. The *nix folk take a certain pride in hand coding things; the tradeoff is purity for convenience.
Maybe once you’re finished with your pet project, you can offer to update the Geany folks’ site design
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