Anjuta DevStudio 2.0.1 alpha released

"VI and Emacs are just not productive enough for big GUI projects to compete with developers on Visual Studio..."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...I can hardly stop laughing...I think my sides are going to split in twain...

First, Vi, Emacs, Visual Studio, or anything else "IS NOT PRODUCTIVE AT ALL"....."PEOPLE ARE PRODUCTIVE".....

Second, have you seen the crap that gets produced with VS and Delphi and other RAD tools (not that it's the tools fault).

Being productive as a software developer has about ZERO to do with tools being used. 99% is determined by the person doing the development. What kind of practices they use in development, etc.

It has been my experience that 80 - 90% of developers create nothing but garbage code that is so damned obfuscated and precarious that the slightest modification requires 10 times longer than it should.

Open Source software is one of the few places where I see "Good" development going on and most of it is done with VI and EMACS....

Personally, I think Emacs and Glade along with Autotools is about the best development environment one can have...but, as I said, it's almost immaterial...there are just too many incompetents in this industry.

Loads of people who have neither the apptitude nor the inclination went into this industry thinking they were going to "get rich" and they polluted it to such an extent that it is "hands down" one of the least professional industries (at least here in the US).

The entire profession is a joke as far as most people are concerned.

Chains find only willing wrists...so if you're willing, vote Republican.

Please people, read comments with an open mind.

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...I can hardly stop laughing..."

I wouldn't launch so hard if I were you. I have been a Linux/GTK developer since 2000/2001, and I've been a Windows developer since 1998 or 1999. I'm also a big Delphi fan. I've been using Emacs since a few months ago. Development tools in Linux have many strengths compared to Windows tools, but also many weaknesses.

Although I have never used Visual Studio, I have to agree that Emacs alone, or any editor alone, plus a bunch of terminals, is not the optimal way to write GUI applications. For example, to create a new window with GTK, you have to:
1. Write a function definition and a few variable definitions in the header file.
2. Write some definitions in the source file.
3. variable = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_TOPLEVEL);
gtk_window_set_title (GTK_WINDOW (variable), ...);
...etc...

In Delphi, you just click the 'New Form' button, and that's it. It takes care of most of the tedius things automatically for you.
Yes, I know about Glade. I use it very frequently. It's useful, but not as good as it can be. For example, Glade uses multiple windows. This clutters my task bar. Delphi uses multiple windows too, but all those windows together only have a single taskbar button. You can minimize *all* Delphi windows by just clicking on the minimize button for the main window, or by clicking on the taskbar button. And if you raise one of the Delphi windows, all the other Delphi windows are raised too. Those windows act like a *group*. On Linux, such behavior is unfortunately not possible due to window manager suckage (Linux window managers do many things better than Windows, suck as virtual desktops and magnetic window snapping, but grouping windows is a huge weakness).

In Delphi, you can edit items in list controls. Not possible with Glade. In Delphi, you can edit a label or edit control's text by typing in that text, even if the object inspector (property window in glade) doesn't have the focus. In Delphi, I only have to doubleclick on a button to create/browse to a callback function. In Glade, you can't do that: you must manually write a callback function in the editor, which often involves browsing through the API documentation so you know how to declare the callback function. Browsing to a certain callback function requires searching; in Delphi, you just doubleclick. Little things like this makes me MUCH more productive in Delphi.

Furthermore, GTK is in many ways better than the VCL (Delphi's component library), such as the box packing model which allows you write resizable windows, but in some ways also worse, in the sence that it requires more code to certain things.
I wouldn't use Delphi for large programs with highly dynamic user interfaces (interfaces that transform a lot), but it's VERY good for small to mid size applications.

Last but not least, there's code completion and inline argument hints! If I type MessageBox( in Delphi, it'll automatically show me what arguments the function requires. If you type ListBox1., it'll automatically show you what methods are available for object ListBox1. This is much faster and much more convenient than launching your browser and going to the API documentation webpage!!! Emacs has a third party extension which does something similar (I forgot the name), but it's so sluggish that it makes it practically unusable.

I suspect Visual Studio is similar: it has many little things that can make you more productive.

Autoconf is not bad, but I still remember the days of when I first tried learning it: it was hell. There are no good autoconf tutorials. I learned everything by looking at other projects' source code. Furthermore, autoconf is *very* slow. Just take a look at how long autogen and configure needs.
Autoconf's advantage over Delphi is that you can do complex things, such as configuring Makefiles based on the platforms. But for simple things, autoconf is just a bit too complex. The only reason why I use autoconf is because it's consistent with all the other open source projects.

So far, you've only said Delphi/Visual Studio/etc sucks, but you fail to explain WHY you think that. Have you actually used Delphi/Visual Studio for more than a few minutes? Or at all? Can you come up with some good arguments instead of just inflammatory comments?

I'm really looking forward to a native GTK RAD environment like Anjuta, and of what I've used in the 2.0.0 alpha release, it looks extremely promising. I'm using Eclipse for all my C++ work on GTK, which is great but not a native GNOME RAD app. Big thanks to the Anjta Devs for their efforts. I'd love to see a debina/ubuntu binary sometime, makes life a lot easier.

It's a situation we have not yet resolved. Just set the following in your shell:

export LD_LIBRARAY_PATH=/usr/lib/mozilla-xx

where /usr/lib/mozilla-xx is the path to mozilla libraries in your system.

Thanks.

Regards,
-Naba

That should be:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/mozilla-xx