Re: Recommend a good programming environment for beginner?
Thomas Weidenfeller wrote:
e) Select at least two you like best and use them. Two, or more, so you don't get dependent on a certain IDE.
I wish my managers at various jobs understood this. In enterprise development
it is not uncommon for the Powers That Be to mandate an IDE for all developers
in the name of "consistency" (hark to Ralph Waldo Emerson's warning about "a
foolish consistency") and the ability to "share knowledge". But they ignore
the dangers of IDE dependencies.
For example, Eclipse is sometimes too smart - I've seen it resolve classpath
issues silently, which messed up a delivery that was built without Eclipse's
help. IDEs often include their own libraries, sometimes, like Netbeans's
"AbsoluteLayout" or WebSphere Application Developer's SWT GUI library, that
can be a problem where wider standards are desirable.
I believe that emacs (or vi) in conjunction with an Ant-driven build is the
"best" way to guarantee a clean delivery, though not necessarily the most
productive for development and debugging.
Besides these issues, if you're a working programmer you need to be facile
enough to adopt whatever mandatory IDE your employer (foolishly?) demands.
- Lew