Ok, sysprogs is clearly an account created just to spam HN with this link, (guess they win, it made it to the front page) but really? This seems very out of sync with both the Raspberry Pi goals, and the world in general. How about 'vi hello.c; make hello; ./hello' ? Pretty simple yes? Woohoo my first RaspPi "app"! But this crappy toolchain? Really?
Ok so perhaps I'm too harsh here but I think the nice thing about the RasPi is that you get to actually talk to the machine and experience "real" programming. This seems to be a parody of everything that is wrong with development today.
Hey, what about all those guys that are used to "Plug-and-play" tools like Visual Studio? That don't want to rediscover the common problems and spend countless hours trying to figure out how to do something slightly less trivial than just Hello, World? What if somebody just wants to get things working fast and does not want to learn how to make the cursor move up in vim?
There are for sure a lot of guys used to simple tools like vim, but there are also plenty of people that believe that tools are just tools and the more intuitive the tools are the better it is.
And as for the development today, it's becoming more and more about the result and not about the process. About how fast you can get your application or game up and running. And hours spent on figuring out why something is not working when it should is becoming rather an avoidable annoyance than the experience of "real" programming.
> the more intuitive the tools are the better it is.
"Intuitive" is a pretty vague virtue, and I'm not sure that VS has it.
If we're talking about discoverability of a feature, I guess you could say a tool that exposes most of its options and features through a wide swath of icons and giant tree of menus leading to various dialog boxes of doom has something of an edge in that one can walk down all the paths until a desired option is found (or not found), and each point is something like a flag that says "Hey, feature here!" Then again, it's hard to tell how relevant or irrelevant it is to what your needs are, and I can similarly walk/search through documentation for a given text editor until I accomplish the same thing.
> What if somebody just wants to get things working fast and does not want to learn how to make the cursor move up in vim?
There are some pretty nice text editors out there that have keybindings considerably more intuitive than vim. Even gvim has two intuitive ways to move the cursor (arrow keys + mouse).
There's the question of which keybindings are most rewarding to the user who puts time in, too. The longer you're going to spend in a tool, the more important this is relative to how easily discoverable features are.
> it's becoming more and more about the result and not about the process.
Becoming?
> hours spent on figuring out why something is not working when it should is becoming rather an avoidable annoyance
Certainly not my experience with Visual Studio over the last year.
I guess, this is a lot about the taste and preference, but an IDE is much more than a text editor. Talking about debugging, there's an illustrated listing of top 10 Visual Studio debugging tricks here: http://visualgdb.com/debugging/
It would be interesting to see how could one do something as efficient with just a text editor.
What exactly is Visual Studio going to protect you from?! I'm struggling to see how coding the thing in C using Visual Studio is going to be substantially easier in any meaningful way than coding it in C using anything else. It's just going to cut out some of the Unix crap. And, well - what's the problem with that? Why does coding always have to be done via the Unix command line and terminal-based tools?
Perhaps everybody else's definition of "real" programming is just rather different from mine, but I personally see use of the command line rather than some GUI tool as a mostly-irrelevant side issue that has relatively little to do with making the computer do things by writing code.
Ok so perhaps I'm too harsh here but I think the nice thing about the RasPi is that you get to actually talk to the machine and experience "real" programming. This seems to be a parody of everything that is wrong with development today.