RE: powerful editors versus IDEs (was: License to Steal)

["Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Wright [mailto:simon@pushface.org]

> Jings! management gone mad! you need to look into a proper source code
> management system. CVS is free (so is SCCS, but why you would want to
> use it I don't know ..)
>
> What do your source files look like after a few updates? full of crap
> telling me who changed stuff and (perhaps) why, completely obscuring
> the program logic and making it look so ugly that anyone with the
> faintest sense of aesthetics comes over faint when asked to look at
> it.

I couldn't agree more.  We were forced to do it on Apex, and
now we are being forced to do it with PVCS on Windows NT.

The only justification that I've heard that has any merit is
that it tells you why the change was made.  As you say, that
seems like very little benefit for the amount of noise and
confusion it introduces into the code.  I have yet to see it
resolve anything.

And what's worse, if the change is later discovered to have
problems, then you have update comments on top of update
comments.  Why not just correct the code?  Yuck!

The CM tools provide a fairly good capability of displaying
the differences, making the comments quite redundant.
Granted they can be a little difficult to interpret if the
change history gets very lengthy.