[Cialug] Windows 7 Hotcakes

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 9:35 AM, <joshstrobl at hush.ai> wrote:

> I agree on the issue of software development. At school (me being a
> high schooler) we use Visual Studio 2008 for programming. It's a
> great IDE no doubt, you can do console-based applications and
> windows applications. Unfortunately, this is something Linux lacks.
> I use Gambas 2, the closest thing do a decent graphical
> application. For command-line (console-based) I use MonoDevelop.
> You ever think that somebody will come out with a more accurate and
> user friendly IDE for creating graphical applications?
>
>
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.

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.

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.

The company I work for is making a product called Quickly [
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly] 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.

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.

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.

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter
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