A question for the programmers and web developers here ...

[XmisterIS]

Or do you use some whizz-bang development tool?

I've been coding for years and I use good old XEmacs on Debian Linux.

When I say this to other coders and developers they look at me aghast saying, "What??? You mean you haven't spent hundreds of pounds on armfuls of tools like sophisticated CMS generators, and web development tools like Dreamweaver?"

"Nope", I say, "Just XEmacs. I've built my own CMS library and I write my own PHP, Javascript, HTML and XML". Back in the old days when I learned to write code as a small child, it was BBC Basic or Assembler. That was it!

The only thing I do use a tool for is JCreator (freeware) for writing Java - but I do need a tool for writing Java, I find it helps.

So - are you a tool junkie or an old-skool programmer?

 

[yello]

vi

how 'old school' is that?

Back before there was 'development tools', coders like me had even been known to use a pencil and note pad! In fact, someone I once worked with wouldn't even go near the 'machine room' until they'd got the code hand crafted on A4. My how times change.

 

[Dan B]

You're asking two different questions there, I think. The development tools you use are basically up to you (unless you're doing pair programming), but libraries and platforms directly affect the people you work with or the people who will eventually take over maintenance from you. I suffer as badly as anyone from NIH - I think it's a natural consequence of the programmer arrogance that's necessary for us to get the job done at all - but I'm always asking myself if there's already a library that does what I want (lately, "would I be better off doing this in Rails?") and what my excuse is for ignoring it

I still use a pencil and paper, though more for design than coding: once I find myself writing down bits of actual code that's a pretty good sign I should transfer to the keyboard

 

[vorsprung]

Or do you use some whizz-bang development tool?

I've been coding for years and I use good old XEmacs on Debian Linux.

When I say this to other coders and developers they look at me aghast saying, "What??? You mean you haven't spent hundreds of pounds on armfuls of tools like sophisticated CMS generators, and web development tools like Dreamweaver?"

I am very old skool

At the moment I am using gvim, firebug and a few xterms for development. My code uses the dojo javascript library on the client end and python on the server. In the past I have used Django on the server

Django is a python library for doing CMS-a-like kind of stuff, it's pretty cool
Dreamweaver isn't used that much by proper front end developers, the stuff it generates is too messy

 

[Dan B]

There seems to me a curious dissonance between claiming to be "old skool" and writing web apps with javascript and stuff like that in them. Unless you're writing them in C or Bourne shell script, anyway

 

[vorsprung]

There seems to me a curious dissonance between claiming to be "old skool" and writing web apps with javascript and stuff like that in them. Unless you're writing them in C or Bourne shell script, anyway

Sorry I should make it clear. I am old skool in the sense that I first set up a live web server in 1994. I was using the Internet at the end of the 80s and remember the start of the WWW. I've more or less kept up with developments since then and just as CGI pages in C were cutting edge then, so Dojo libraries and stuff like that is fairly modern now. Using vi and xterms to develop with is the throw back bit I suppose.

Also I remember doing web pages in the mid 1990s that had javascript in them. One popular trick was scrolling a message in the status bar. One just had to be very careful to ensure that it would work nicely or gracefully fail on the various browsers available then. Now I just use Dojo to support "difficult" features and do the cross browser compatibility for me

 

[XmisterIS]

Vorsprung said what I was thinking ... I use various public-domain libraries to do stuff that would otherwise take me forever and a day, but I develop in a plain, old-fashioned text editor. I do all my design diagrams on pencil and paper in a notebook.

 

[S_t_e_v_e]

For all web related development in PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS, I use UltraEdit - I very good text editor. It may take a little longer than using tools such as dreamweaver, but the result is 'beautiful' code... :-)

 

[Dan B]

Also I remember doing web pages in the mid 1990s that had javascript in them. One popular trick was scrolling a message in the status bar.

Oh god yes. Popular with the developers, perhaps popular with the client, massively unpopular with any user who wanted to see where links would go if they clicked on them.


Stippled backgrounds, "under construction" signs, animated gifs, blueball.gif, wavy separator lines, dreadfully bad font choices, geocities, jumpers for goalposts ... never going back to that

 

[amnesia]

Mainframe PL/1 & CICS here... only tools we have are screen dialogue prototyping tools which have been developed in-house, just like the 4,000,000 lines of application code to go with it.

Doesn't get much more old school than a dumb terminal emulator running in Citrix.

 

[XmisterIS]

For all web related development in PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS, I use UltraEdit - I very good text editor. It may take a little longer than using tools such as dreamweaver, but the result is 'beautiful' code... :-)

IME, so-called "helpful" tools like Dreamweaver actually take longer than hand-coding! If you have a good working knowledge of CSS and HTML and you understand OO principles and can write good OO php (rather than just putting everything in one, huge script ... which I've seen plenty of coders do), then the whizz-bang tools are a hinderance!

 

[yello]

The means and tools of software development changed enormously in the 20 years that I was coding (up to 2004 say). More particularly in the last 10 years.

When I started coding, the maximum program (code segment) was 256k! We could only have so many programs in a library and only had access to 2 libraries at any one time (and a call to the 2nd library was memory intensive and kept to a minimum). Memory usage was constrained too. So you HAD to be efficient and build/use a library of common routines. In a sense, we were thinking applets before the term even came into being. It was a good discipline to learn. In times of code development, it was a coding pad and a basic text editor. That's it.

PCs, graphic interfaces and 3rd party development tools radically changed the way things were done. You could develop apps so much more quickly (once you'd got your design right) - a lot of that grunt work of building the libs of common routines was already done for you. Due to my particular blend of skills and background, I stayed (more-or-less) maintaining and developing 'legacy' code. I used the same development platform (of course) as the new "whizz-bang" stuff, sometimes reverse engineering legacy code into a new environment, but rarely got to develop from scratch using the new tools. From the business point of view, it was cheaper to employ new grads (that knew the tools) to do that stuff (or outsource it) then to retrain existing staff.

I didn't find the new tools (or concepts) difficult to understand though (which is often an assumption made about older IT staff). In fact, often it was only the terminology (now richer and more expansive) that was different with the underlying concept being familiar. There was a change in approach; development was often spoken of in terms of data rather than process (and you'd talk in terms of data properties, and performing actions on data) but it was a change in design approach rather than objective.

 

[cisamcgu]

vi
putty
notepad

- I still yearn for a return to VMS .. !

 

[martint235]

I use Net Fusion Objects cos I'm lazy and like it's drag and drop interface.

With regards to the comment about not going near the machine room until the code was written on a pad, when i first started coding back at school, the machine room was 20 miles away in a college and I had to send the program on punched cards.

It was very infuriating to wait for a week only to find a syntax error on the second card of 200.

And I don't count myself as being all that old!!!

 

[yello]

With regards to the comment about not going near the machine room until the code was written on a pad, when i first started coding back at school, the machine room was 20 miles away in a college and I had to send the program on punched cards.

It was very infuriating to wait for a week only to find a syntax error on the second card of 200.

And I don't count myself as being all that old!!!

I first (and the only time) used punch cards at school, 1973-ish I guess. But, yes, debugging was an infuriatingly slow process!!