Joe Armstrong on developer tools
Recently on the Erlang-mailing list I skipped the following question:
The answer of Joe Armstrong, the author of the language Erlang:
Tula will never be able to replace your head. Nothing that you listed helps me think. In real life, most of the time is spent on thinking about the problem. Therefore, as soon as you have a solution, you can program it in a couple of hours.
The best tool that we have is of course mathematics or, more precisely, logical conclusions and proofs.
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There are two types of programmers. Some write 10 lines per day and confidently move to the final product. Others write 100 or even 1000 lines a day, but they are marking time. They will never get the product, because they do not understand what problem they are solving. They write tons of code to understand this. This creates the illusion of employment and is well paid.
The biggest problem in programming is a clear understanding of the problem you are solving. Tula, which we have now, is no better than those that were 40 years ago. My brain is still better at debugging the code than the most sophisticated debugger. I have no idea how this works, but when you think about a task for a long time and go to bed, in the morning you will wake up with a decision. And it is much cooler than any super-modern IDE.
I prefer to think about how my application actually works, and not about how Eclipse works. Code editing is not a problem. I’m quite happy with Emacs or even a pen with paper, which, unlike Eclipse, you can always take with you.
I spend 65% of the time trying to figure out why this or that tool does not work. Every time, there are some problems and I constantly have to fix them. Tula are absolutely useless when they are broken.
The problem is not in the Tula themselves, but when they are broken, it takes all the time to fix them. Therefore, I try to use only the most minimal and simple set. Emacs, make and bash are all I need.
I remember the times when programmers understood each other perfectly. Anyone who knew how to program knew how to write a Makefile and bash script. Now, a person who has not seen anything except Java and Maven enters into a stupor when they send him a Rake file.
Tula that we have for development on Erlang - just rubbish! I'm sorry, but it's 2014 now, and we still use Vim and Makefiles. Yes, there is Rebar . But compared to Maven, Gradle (or even SBT) is a student hack that someone posted on GitHub. About plug-ins for Eclipse and Intellij, I generally keep quiet. They just don't work. Therefore, I always come back to Vim. I just want to write code that solves my problem and not think about how to write a Makefile with all dependencies.
The answer of Joe Armstrong, the author of the language Erlang:
Tula will never be able to replace your head. Nothing that you listed helps me think. In real life, most of the time is spent on thinking about the problem. Therefore, as soon as you have a solution, you can program it in a couple of hours.
The best tool that we have is of course mathematics or, more precisely, logical conclusions and proofs.
')
There are two types of programmers. Some write 10 lines per day and confidently move to the final product. Others write 100 or even 1000 lines a day, but they are marking time. They will never get the product, because they do not understand what problem they are solving. They write tons of code to understand this. This creates the illusion of employment and is well paid.
The biggest problem in programming is a clear understanding of the problem you are solving. Tula, which we have now, is no better than those that were 40 years ago. My brain is still better at debugging the code than the most sophisticated debugger. I have no idea how this works, but when you think about a task for a long time and go to bed, in the morning you will wake up with a decision. And it is much cooler than any super-modern IDE.
I prefer to think about how my application actually works, and not about how Eclipse works. Code editing is not a problem. I’m quite happy with Emacs or even a pen with paper, which, unlike Eclipse, you can always take with you.
I spend 65% of the time trying to figure out why this or that tool does not work. Every time, there are some problems and I constantly have to fix them. Tula are absolutely useless when they are broken.
The problem is not in the Tula themselves, but when they are broken, it takes all the time to fix them. Therefore, I try to use only the most minimal and simple set. Emacs, make and bash are all I need.
I remember the times when programmers understood each other perfectly. Anyone who knew how to program knew how to write a Makefile and bash script. Now, a person who has not seen anything except Java and Maven enters into a stupor when they send him a Rake file.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/211070/
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