Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why did Borland fail?

quora.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 269 posts

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#161

Post by hendzen »

mikerichards wrote: post #100
jquery wrote: 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 work on a large C++ codebase in emacs. I find emacs keybindings and extensibility (via elisp) far superior to any IDE - and I have tried Eclipse, CLion (IDEA for C++), Code/Blocks and Netbeans.

For C/C++ specifically, the state of code analysis in emacs has greatly improved due to clang. For example, I get full auto-complete (including for variables declared 'auto') in emacs with irony-mode [0] for code completion, flycheck-irony [1] for on-the-fly syntax checking, and I get jump to definition/find references/etc via clang-ctags [2]. I assume vim has similar extensions.

[0] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

[1] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/flycheck-irony

[2] - https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#162

Post by xorcist »

duaneb wrote: post #109
mikerichards wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's amazing that in 2015 we have people that use Emacs, Vim, or other editors that don't have intelligent, realtime code analysis and we consider that "hardcore, programmer machismo". I think it's mostly that the current state of "intelligent, realtime code analysis" is so terrible that it can be replaced with "rename" and "find references of". I.e. ctags.

Back "15+ years ago" ctags was so much better than Eclipse it wasn't even funny.

Yet some people hate it because it's not "modern", mostly meaning you can't control it with the mouse.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#163

Post by tomjen3 »

mikerichards wrote: post #107
mikerichards wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

to Nhanh. Emacs, Slime and Common Lisp is something that I would give an exception to. The major productivity I give to that combo is the ability to change the code on the fly while debugging, especially Common Lisp's continue from exception mechanism. Smalltalk environments have had this ability forever. I just imagine how much more productive I could be if in Visual Studio I could edit-n-continue on everything...ev…

Common Lisps exception mechanism is indeed out of this world, but that isn't something that has been implemented in any other language that I know of (not even Clojure) and you have to pay a fortune to get a CL system that works cross-platform with things like threading or a FI that allows lisp callbacks from C code. Java has supported both since forever (and its java.util.concurrent namespace means any old Java programmer has access to all sorts of really advanced non-blocking data structures, including a ConcurrentSkipListMap and an AtomicInteger) and for most people, for almost all tasks, that makes Java better. And for Java you need an IDE.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#164

Post by duaneb »

tomjen3 wrote: post #158
duaneb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's amazing that in 2015 we have people that use Emacs, Vim, or other editors that don't have intelligent, realtime code analysis and we consider that "hardcore, programmer machismo". I think it's mostly that the current state of "intelligent, realtime code analysis" is so terrible that it can be replaced with "rename" and "find references of". I.e. ctags.

Then you have no idea about the current state of intelligent, realtime code analysis. Any old Java IDE should be able to rename length to size on an interface and have all the classes that implement that interface update the name, then have all the places that calls it update to use the new name. Try that with rename and you will quickly run into trouble, unless you have only one class that has a method called length…

This is still a rename operation. I have difficulty understanding how this would require an IDE for anything but the more complex codebases, and even then, I would much prefer a discrete code server.

Refactoring is still in its infancy. A), it's not entirely possible on C/C++ because of macros. B), they are serialized extremely poorly to diffs, so any boon from refactoring is sidestepped by SCM. C), most of the refactoring done by programmers cannot be done automagically by the IDE (e.g. type signature changes are painful as hell). D), 95% of changes are supported by ctags-like functionality; i.e., a basic identifier index, and re-compiling to fix the bugs.

Given this, I'm pretty sure IDEs have made a lot of progress towards renaming and looking up references really well, but not a lot of progress towards actually being useful.

That said, I do find that when the language supports it, a precise tool to find usages and/or rename is worth its wait in gold. But this is hardly anything near "intelligent, realtime code analysis". Pretty sure that's referring to typeahead, which again is a step removed from a source code index and can be faked by using a regular expression to extract identifiers to suggest.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#165

Post by kjhsadklj1 »

_ak wrote: post #35
voidfunc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should tell JetBrains the whole IDE market is dead.

I'm not saying the market is still dead, but for a company like Borland, 10 years ago there was nothing they could have done to recover from Eclipse taking over the market. Even then, IntelliJ was a relative niche product (compared to the vast ubiquity of Eclipse), and JetBrains did diversify their product portfolio to both more aspects of the development lifecycle and to more specialized needs in IDEs. Anyway, my po…

I'm curious - what do you think / what did you see in your experience - that was the reason people chose a Borland product over another choice?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#166

Post by duaneb »

tomjen3 wrote: post #153
srj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I can't tell if this post is a troll or not. :) Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not. I could understand giving that feedback ("try an IDE") but telling them their job is contingent on it is probably missing the point. Most of the people I work with seem to use vim/emacs, and it doesn't appear to be for "machismo" reasons. It's likely just what they're used…

>Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not. The best programmers I work with use emacs or vim and are good enough to keep up even though most others use intelliJ ides, but it is a handicap, they are just good enough to overcome it. I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE.

> I have no doubt they would be even better in a good IDE.

Do you really think the best programmers spend enough time refactoring for the use of an IDE to help?

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#168

Post by tomjen3 »

ExpiredLink wrote: post #34
_ak wrote: post #16

As a former Borland employee (not for very long, 2006-2009, and actually working in their Austrian offices, which originally became part of the company through the Segue acquisition), I certainly didn't have the complete picture, but our managers, even going as far as those located in Cupertino, and later Austin, were quite open about what Borland's issue was: even with the rise of Java, they thought they could conti…

IIRC, JBuilder cost almost $500 back then. Eclipse initially wasn't better but open (for extensions) and gratis.

A license for IntelliJ for a company is currently 499 euro. Admitably it still gets you much more than JBuilder would have - including support for 7 or so additional languages - but it is not even close to cheap.

If you are buying for yourself, then it is 199 euro which is less than half the price (although that doesn't include VAT).

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#169

Post by xorcist »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yokam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yokam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." Any day of the week! Why is this even in question?

It depends on who you want to be and how you want to sell your product. At the absolute top where Google and Facebook is, there's no choice, there's just a billion customers.

Re: Why did Borland fail?

#170

Post by datashovel »

srj wrote: post #128
mikerichards wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 guess I can't tell if this post is a troll or not. :) Someone not getting their job done is a problem. Someone using vim as their editor is not. I could understand giving that feedback ("try an IDE") but telling them their job is contingent on it is probably missing the point. Most of the people I work with seem to use vim/emacs, and it doesn't appear to be for "machismo" reasons. It's likely just what they're used…

I've been curious in the past, trying to find a reason to use an IDE. For me, the loose coupling of tools that you get when working with Vim in a console is priceless.

My trick (not really a trick) for efficiency is some simple key bindings to navigate between windows in Screen.

And if I really need power I'll run tabs inside of individual Vim instances within each Screen window.

I really think IDE dependence is one of the things that can prevent agility within a team. As soon as you introduce a product into your stack that a person's IDE doesn't have deep integration with, or doesn't play nicely with, all that productivity that person gained by learning that IDE is all of a sudden gone.

Post reply on HN