Don’t underestimate the value of a good debugger
This morning I followed a trail of breadcrumbs…
Aq pointed me at Simon’s complaint about downloading Eclipse and Ned’s comments about just writing code, which led me to Oliver’s The IDE Divide and Bob’s response.
As stated numerous times, I am a big fan of Visual Studio .NET, as I believe it makes me faster. This is because of its:
The last entry on that list is my main reason for using an IDE. Being able to step through my code, set breakpoints, evaluate/modify variables and see exceptions as they happen is worth the money (or not as the case may be) to me. Combined, all of the features make me a faster developer, but it’s manual debugging and minor syntax errors that really slow me down.
Since really getting into Mono coding, I’ve mainly been using vim and gedit combined with Monodoc and the command line Mono tools instead of MonoDevelop. Part of this is habit – MonoDevelop was slow and unreliable under my old FC2 install – and part of it is that it doesn’t add a huge amount of benefit if you are used to using make (which I even use for Delphi projects on Windows!). But if it had a built-in visual debugger, it would be top of my list.
In the past I was (to use Oliver’s terminology) a tool maven – I would hop from IDE to IDE, try plugins to get the most out them, and choose my languages based on their IDE (which is why I never really got into JavaScript). These days they’re just electric screwdrivers to me – they do the job faster, but you don’t need them.
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29 Nov 2004 7:41 am
I am currently using Anjuta for some C development but I quite often use vim or gedit. IDE’s are for the lazy and we are all lazy
29 Nov 2004 7:41 am
I’m not really following your conclusion here. Are you saying that your Mono development environment isn’t as good as Visual Studio (because it’s absent a debugger), which is what the article appears to imply for 90% of it? Or do you mean that IDEs aren’t necessary and your Mono development environment is as good as an “all-in-one” IDE like VS (as the last paragraph seems to suggest)?