On 29/10/2006, at 3:00 AM, Mark Munz wrote: Sometimes we get really frustrated with our tools and because those tools are critical to our own success as developers, we launch our attacks without hesitation.
Imagine what it would have been like 15 years ago had the Amiga shipped with a free c compiler and a few floppies worth of API/FAQ - where would we be now?
I envy those twelve year olds who get a hold of daddy's mac tiger this summer, and begin coding the equivalent of "10 print "woohoo"; 20 goto 10;" stuff, I was writing random poetry on the apple IIe in 1983, in BASIC - 10 years old. There were no books or anything useful about "machine code" only some quite sketchy stuff about how to make a "database" in BASIC. I think the school was so hurt by the enormously costly computers they couldn't afford the outrageously rare technical manuals to accompany them.
So if there's anyone left reading this thread, let them spread the word to apple to remember the very young programmers out there whose parents wouldn't even know how to turn a computer on, and if they only had some clear instructions they could be away!
Anything *negative* that anyone says about Xcode, is simply inaccurate. Everything about Xcode is ultra-slick; You don't like it? Go spend the last five years with "Homesite" or "JEdit" again, go learn perl all over again, go work with VBA and ActionScript, HTML and _javascript_ (ok HomeSite was pretty good for a while) all over again, and tell me, seriously that there is a better IDE than Xcode. I'm not counting terminal-based apps. ;)
You won't be able to. The best you will be able to come up with is V$05 - free now, and very slick. The runtime is where the real problems are (haha, but the editor is first rate). But it doesn't have the mac feel, I'm saying this as someone who has used VS at work and home for three years, and loved every minute of it, before that it was BloodShed, or Kate / vi in linux, and what about Turbo-C ?
EVERY SINGLE THING I missed about VS was actually tucked away in Xcode. I was up and running with it in MINUTES, there's a testament to the Mac people. After one day, I was compiling my Win32 sources (which admittedly went through a bit of testing/editing on an Ubuntu box before they got there), and after two the port is nearly finished, I'm lucky because I build everything in code, so no messy resource wrangling.
The Apple People are obviously using Xcode to build future versions of Xcode, which is why it keeps getting better, I'd guess.
Sooner or later a c++ purist will move through the xcode engineering team and insist that the standard library be given the very best and most comprehensive code-complete / argument-hint / debug-visualiser treatment money can buy.
Then it will rock.
Because,
Not everyone wants to make a packet-sniffing, pdf-printing, 3dfx-enabled, gui-fest. Some of us just want to continue what we were doing in c++ (before we finally got a mac), and add a simple graphic human interface. And that is where Mac began. With this funky little gem of a graphical windowing system, based on something they got from some buddy of theirs in photocopying ;)
The cycle continues.
|