Re: Language support for flexible handling of system-detected errors.

[hack@watson.ibm.com (hack)]

In article <a8a2v5$91j$1@nh.pace.co.uk>,
Marin David Condic <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote:
>
>I think one of the reasons that many people like the "closed" IDEs with
>everything related to a particular language and compiler is just that it
>comes down to "One Stop Shopping". ...

For the many people who want or need just one such environment, this is
indeed very nice.  Even if they also use an e-mail system and common word
processor, the editing capabilities are probably not that different, and
cut&paste can probably handle 90% of cross-domain activity.  (What *really*
gets my dander is environments that don't support universal cross-domain
cut&paste, because they "know" what one might want to copy.  Note that I'm
just talking about text strings here, not about somebody preventing me from
copying a picture into an audio file.)

The situation is different for the (probably much smaller) number of people
who work on different projects, concurrently or sequentially.  The kinds of
things they do are of a similar nature, but now each "closed" IDE provides a
noticeably different environment, and the more sophisticated activities may
be conceptually similar, but will have to be carried out differently.  One
may be able to write private macros to encapsulate such activities (assuming
the IDE is programmable enough) but will not be able to reuse them in another
"closed" IDE -- and one will have difficulty combining them with generic
private tools (edit macros etc.) of one's main working environment.

What would be *ideal* is a set of IDEs organised around a couple of common
control and display paradigms (enabling interfacing to other environments),
together with a specifically tailored user interface that provides useful
defaults so that all the benefits of a "closed" IDE are also realised.  In
other words, a usable editor and scripting language would be included, but
could be replaced by those with a wider range of needs or desires.

I very much doubt that I'm the only one in this boat...