Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?

From: "Till Varoquaux" <till.varoquaux@gmail.com>
To: "Kuba Ober" <ober.14@osu.edu>
Cc: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:31:26 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <9d3ec8300810211231j40dbbef2ifdd6c2f6b84a2048@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <200810211435.51102.ober.14@osu.edu>

I am answering as someone who works at jane street but not for jane
street (i.e. this is my personal point of view but I am a Jane street
employee).

First of all thank you for tackling the IDE problem. Anything that's
good for the Ocaml community is, by osmosis, good for companies
working with Ocaml even if it is indirectly.

There is a mix of Emacs,vim,texmate and other esoteric editors being
used here. We are all free to choose what we use but I think a lot of
us decide to cope with a steeper learning curve in order to gain more
flexibility (there's a big difference between hacking as your day job
and coding for a one term class). Dethroning emacs (or vim or ....)
might therefor be a bit of a challenge. That being said a fair amount
of advanced IDE features can be oloaded to external tools (in the
spirit of ocamlwizard). I would really love to see a user friendly IDE
interfacing with such a tool (with the heavy lifting done in an
external tool so that other editors could also benefit cheaply from
advanced features like refactoring).

We tend to work with really large code bases and cannot allow editors
we use to dictate the way we build and/or structure our tree. This
means that emacs/vim are currently closer to our needs than
eclipse/visual studio. This, however, might be very different for
student in an introduction to functional programming class. I thinks
both use cases exists and should be considered (maybe in different
IDE's) you may decide to cater to either or even both. Whatever you do
I know many of us will be following potential outcomes closely.

Till

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 2:35 PM, Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu> wrote:
>> > I really like OcaIDE (http://ocaml.eclipse.ortsa.com:8480/ocaide/).
>> > It's Eclipse plugin so Windows is fully supported (including graphical
>> > debugging). IMHO it's (almost) ready for commercial development. Many
>> > features are very convenient: hyperlink jumps, code outline, type
>> > tooltip on mouse hoovering, completion etc. Give it a try.
>>
>> In other words, Dmitry's short list for Camelia is OcalIDE's feature's
>> list ;-)
>>
>> Seriously, give it a try. It's a good way to see how things could be
>> done.
>
> I will give it a try, prepare a feature list, and ask people to vote on
> priorities. I will follow Joel Spolsky's feature selection process. This
> will happen no earlier than 30 days from now, as getting Camelia into shape
> is my first priority, extra features will come later.
>
> Cheers, Kuba
>
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