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Why did Borland fail?

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111–120 of 269 posts

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#111
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

I think it's that if you use Vim and Emacs properly with the right extensions, then they can be pretty amazing, but if you're just cargo culting and use Vim just to say you use Vim, then it won't work.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#113
post #73
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.

For me the features I appreciate the most are the debugger, framework support, and decent multi-language syntax support (for when there's js embedded in the html). All that and it runs a lot faster than PyDev.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#114
post #91
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.

I'm just curious those using Sublime how they debug their programs?

pry + pry-debugger http://pryrepl.org/ https://github.com/nixme/pry-debugger

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#115
post #6
post #3

Compilers used to be something you paid money for. It took a while, but open source and I would say gcc in particular killed that. It's funny how gcc was around for a long time, but it was only in the 2000s that cash cow compilers started dying. I think that coincides a bit with Linux and OS X becoming popular for developers. For example, it wasn't until 2005 that Microsoft started providing a VS express SKU. You see…

I remember in the 90s advocating for things like gcc and the absolute scorn I would receive. "A free compiler!!! What kind of crap must that be??". You paid for compilers, you paid for your version control, you paid for your bug tracker, and that was that. Interestingly, at that company (a defense contractor) it was the government more than anything that changed that attitude. There were a lot of projects initiated b…

It's important to note that Visual Studio got a lot of love from MS above and beyond what it's revenues would support. Likewise Intel have gcc a lot of love because they needed to get software used to longer pipelines.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#116
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

> where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost.

One can look at it the other way. If your language needs a million lines of IDE code to function and for programmers to be productive with it, maybe it is time to sit down and tell that language to "get lost".

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#117
post #11

Answers to two (closed) Stack Exchange questions are relevant: What happened to Borland Delphi? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/83009/what-ha... Why has C prevailed over Pascal? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/114846/why-ha...

A closed stackexchange question? Ya don't say!

And here I thought it was just the stackoverflow mods that closed everything and you were supposed to take stuff like this to stackexchange.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#118
The Borland Turbo languages where the Cat's Pajamas.

Microsoft countered with the Quick languages.

Borland made Turbo Pascal for Windows and with Objects and then made Delphi.

Microsoft countered with Visual BASIC.

Borland made Borland C++ and JBuiilder.

Microsoft countered with Visual C++ and Visual J++/J# and then later Visual C#.

The free IDEs and Free compiler languages ate into Borland's sales. Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, BlueJ, Sublime Text, GNU C/C++, Apple XCode, FreePascal/Lazarus, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Python, Code::Blocks, etc.

In 2005 Microsoft introduce Visual Studio Express a free version of their development tools.

Like Amiga, Borland had the superior technology, but cheaper/free alternatives undercut their sales.

Mostly it was the free and open source revolution that did Borland in.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#119
post #73
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

What are your top 2 or 3 fav productive boosts in PyCharm? I've tried RubyMine for Ruby, and I didn't like it so I went back to Sublime.

Here's my top 6, in no particular order.

* Its uncanny ability to find references and declarations in both Python and JavaScript, even when the references are dynamic. What is this .log() or .render() actually calling? Instantly I'm looking inside the relevant function, even if there are hundreds of functions with the same name. This works across imports and libraries. Doesn't always work, but even when it doesn't, it usually makes good guesses and lets me select from a list. If you're working on a large, unfamiliar codebase, this is a godsend. You will sometimes wonder why your coworkers are struggling to understand code references and then you realize they don't have this power-tool available to them.

* Local file history separate from git history, with fantastic navigation/diffing support. It's an undo/redo button on steroids that keeps months of history.

* When searching for something, you get a full, scrollable preview of the surrounding context of each matching result. Results are organized within the file hiercharchy and are collapsible.

* Remote debugging. Drop an egg in your remote source and go.

* Annotated code, line by line, with the relevant commit and comment next to it.

* Auto-linting to catch common mistakes when coding. It'll immediately underline suspicious-looking code and tell you why. Lots of customizable style-linters to keep your code pristine looking.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#120
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker introduced me to PyCharm after years of development in vim, and it has been an incredible productivity boost. It's painful to watch coworkers slowly fiddle around with text editors. I almost don't like telling people this because it's such a professional competitive advantage for me after switching. Even my coworkers using Sublime run into pain points that I don't (perhaps because they aren't installing al…

It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost. I…

I use Emacs with intelligent realtime code analysis. Anybody who doesn't use the best Emacs packages for the languages they write is doing it wrong.
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