<div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 9:35 AM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:joshstrobl@hush.ai">joshstrobl@hush.ai</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I agree on the issue of software development. At school (me being a<br>
high schooler) we use Visual Studio 2008 for programming. It's a<br>
great IDE no doubt, you can do console-based applications and<br>
windows applications. Unfortunately, this is something Linux lacks.<br>
I use Gambas 2, the closest thing do a decent graphical<br>
application. For command-line (console-based) I use MonoDevelop.<br>
You ever think that somebody will come out with a more accurate and<br>
user friendly IDE for creating graphical applications?<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br>It's an example of the chicken and egg problem. There are a lot of Linux developers who come from a computer science / UNIX background who are very comfortable with their way of doing things. They don't need an IDE and they honestly don't know why anyone would want one.<br>
<br>Therefore someone has to make one, but they're not going to get a lot of help from the entrenched developers nor will these entrenched developers be potential users. So the potential market is for people who aren't developing on Linux currently and the developers of said product are people who aren't developing for Linux currently.<br>
<br>The groups who have invested the resources into doing this are the ones who create cross-platform tools. For example, Netbeans is a good IDE and it has a nice GUI builder and the apps are Java based and run in Windows, Linux and Mac OS.<br>
<br>The company I work for is making a product called Quickly [<a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly">https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly</a>] which approaches the problem from a different perspective. The UNIX philosophy is to have loosely coupled applications that work together and users are free to modify their tool stack in a variety of ways (which is the anti-IDE philosophy mentioned above). Quickly takes the rough corners off of UNIX development by creating a useful project that a developer can work on with their own preferred toolset and quickly go from working code to a packaged application.<br>
<br>Of course it makes some opinionated assumptions in the spirit of helping you get started quicker and of course those opinionated assumptions favour the tool-sets we use to develop our software and the platforms we use to deliver that software. Not because don't like other options, just that we dogfood our own tools and we're using it to make our own apps.<br>
<br>It seems to be catching on with people who have tried the traditional UNIX way of developing software and got turned off because the learning curve was too steep.<br></div></div><br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, <a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a> and twitter<br>