Jun
18
2008
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Wednesday, 18 June 2008 |
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I have always been fascinated by programming languages, and scripting languages have always had a particular place in my heart. After all, they allow you to develop without much encumbrance, starting from nothing to program in no time. There are no lengthy build and compilation cycles, and sometimes you can even use dynamic language features to make your changes to a running application - neat!
For me, it all started with Forth, which cannot really be called a scripting language at all. It compiles functions into bytecode as soon as they are defined, and the only feature that reminds one of scripting languages is just how easy it is to write and rewrite. Since Forth reacts dynamically to changes and is interpreted,
After that, I discovered Tcl, which quickly became my favorite programming language. It had a rich set of extentions that included GUIs (albeit at that point only on UNIX) and highly dynamic capabilities. It seemed like an ideal choice.
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Aug
25
2005
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Thursday, 25 August 2005 |
Amazing how many people (= geeks) say the only reason they still use Windows is because of Quicken™. The ease of use and the power of that little application that could defy even the Grand Master of software powerhouses ends up being a good paragon of things to strive for.
Linux enthusiasts have been resorting to using Quicken on their favorite OS by virtue of emulation software like Wine. Indeed, the Wine site lists 21 different versions of Quicken and their users' ability to run the software or not.
Not surprisingly a movement went afoot that tried to create fully open source applications that would behave like Quicken and allow for the same stability and ease-of-use, but add flexibility and for some an almost mystical aspect.
After a quick review of the field, there seemed to be only two packages that vied for the title:
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Dec
29
2002
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Sunday, 29 December 2002 |
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There is your expert nerd again! This time the question is: should I use the IBM IDE or Sun's? The question is tricky, since the philosophy of the two engines is different. Sun's NetBeans is a pure Java IDE with support for everything under the sun (pardon the pun). Eclipse is a common IDE for any language, and support for Java and C/C++ is currently under way. I use my IDE only for Java. C and C++ happen in separate IDEs that are more suited for the environment. This means, currently, that all development on Windows happens in Visual C++ and all development on UNIX on KDevel 2.0. I have been working with NetBeans extensively, and it has made wonderful progress. Still, it is a resource hog (over 150MB in development mode), debug is slow (but that may come from the socket debugger I use) and the responsiveness of the IDE leaves a lot to be desired (and this on a machine with 512MB). Eclipse is much faster, from the first impression I got. Still, there are obvious holes in the development process. You can't easily debug an applet, or even make it run. How do you create graphical applications? In the end, it is probably a wash-up. If I'd have to choose I would love NetBeans with dynamic support of features, so that it loads only the stuff I am actually using. Then I'd have the advantages of Eclipse and those of NetBeans, and I'd be happy. Oh, yes - the UI engine of Eclipse eclipses the really ugly UI sported by NetBeans. Eclipse looks like an application should look like. NetBeans is 1998 at best. |
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