Re: [Caml-list] New Ocaml Plug-in for NetBeans

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Saturday 26 July 2008 13:25:10 Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> hmf@inescporto.pt wrote:
> > Ok, this is not a rebuttal but... we all know C, C++, Ocaml, Haskell,
> > Ruby, etc, are supported in Eclipse. Granted support is not
> > perfect, but you can work quite comfortably.
>
> Personally I find Eclipse appalling. It takes forever to start
> up and runs slow as a dog.

Agreed. That is precisely why I think it is a bad idea to build upon Eclipse.

However that is not an inherent property of an IDE. Surely one written in 
OCaml as I described could be extremely fast?

> It might support Java reasonably well 
> but I find its support for C rather poor. I haven't tried it
> with other laguages.

The Scala plugin for Eclipse is also almost unusable. AFAIK, Haskell has 
uniformly poor support in this respect as well. F# is the best of the 
functional languages but still leaves a lot to be desired, IMHO.

> > What I say here also goes for Richard. I am aware that a lot of time
> > has gone into learning these tools (20 years!). I am just saying that to
> > use IDEs also requires effort.
>
> I spent 35+ hours/week for 6 months on VS2005. Is that not enough
> time to learn it?

Have you used the F# mode in Visual Studio?

> > Ok. But most IDE editor also offer most (all?) of those capabilities,
> > correct? Anyway, this is not the issue.
>
> But the Adobe IDE was definitely different to the VS2005 one I
> was using a couple of months earlier. What I really wanted was
> to be using my editor, with my personalised syntax highlighting
> pattern and my macros.
>
> > Granted. But I am defending lowering the barrier for Ocaml use.
>
> If you are advocating IDE use for the purposes of making Ocaml
> easier for newcomers then you are in a bit of a bind. The
> people who need the IDE are the newcomers who are not capable
> of writing one and the ones with sufficient experience to write
> an Ocaml IDE are happy with what they have and are therefore
> not interested in writing one (with the possible exception of
> Jon Harrop).

Actually, many OCaml programmers gave the F# team positive feedback over their 
Visual Studio mode precisely because it makes experienced users so much more 
productive.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e