Programming Tools
I’m attending OSCON (the Open Source Convention) this week and having a great time. I actually went there yesterday without my laptop!
I’ve been trying to find out more about programming tools. So far, I’ve mainly been using just a text editor (Smultron) to write code and print statements for debugging. I feel like I’m back in the 60’s! Anyway, there are two companies selling programming environments that support PHP, JavaScript, and so on: Zend and ActiveState. Both environments cost money, unfortunately, so I need to do some research before getting one. So I start asking around at the conference to people who are writing projects in PHP “what tools are you using to write and debug PHP?” The bizarre thing is that most people I ask are using, you guessed it, text editors (mainly emacs and vim) and print statements. I even asked one of the people who works one of those that sells a programming environment, and he even admitted that he uses emacs and print statements.
What gives?
–wm