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I think one major omission from the current Go ecosystem is a decent GUI library. There have been some attempts however, to my knowledge, they are mostly alpha/beta quality at best, and most of them are missing important functionality (the major ones I'm aware of are go-gtk, go-ui, go-fltk, wxGo, and none of them could be considered production ready IMHO).

I only point this out because I really like Go, and I think Go would actually be a very interesting language to do client side desktop application development in.

I miss this feature a lot when I switch back to windows. I find myself pressing ctrl-n in my browser's address bar, expecting to view my URL history, and instead I get a new windows.

If anyone knows of a way to get similar functionality in windows, I would love to hear about it!

For example:

   d/abc (i.e. delete forward until the text 'abc')

   c/abc (i.e. change the text going forward until the text 'abc')

Unfortunately it doesn't look like these are available yet in Python, as Python doesn't seem to have bindings for QtQuick 2.1, at least based on my googling. Hopefully that will come soon though!

My main complaint about QML is that it really needs to ship with some desktop widgets. Without common desktop widgets, developers are forced to basically reinvent the wheel, and redefining common controls using primitives like rectangles, text, etc. Once this problem is solved though I really hope QML will take off in a big way.

Yes and no. Technically this is possible, but it's almost as unpleasant as just using vimscript.

Scripting vim in python involves using the vim module, which provides a very limited api to interact with vim. It doesn't allow the interception of any events, and interacting with vim more often than not seems to involve calling vim.command() or vim.eval(), which take vimscript as a string.

That said, I still think this is the direction vim needs to go. I think if the vim python integration improves in future releases it will be much appreciated, and will provide a boost to the vim plugin community.

   public string Field { get; set;}

   public string field;

1) By convention anyone reading your code will think this is very strange, and it will force them to spend additional time reading your code to understand why you are breaking such a strong convention.

2) Using properties really will make your life easier when you need to track down a state change in your program. Detecting a state change on a public setter is a lot easier than detecting state change on a public field.

3) In C#, at least, using public fields where you should be using public properties will make creating an interface on existing code significantly more difficult - as interfaces can only define public properties, and not fields.

In short please don't do this. It's really bad practice just to save a couple extra characters, and if I inherit your code someday I'll probably want to strangle you.

OSX provides a POSIX environment, and OSX is obviously not a Linux distribution. In fact Microsoft already provides SUA (Subsystem for Unix Applications) which is basically a POSIX environment, but iirc SUA is only available in certain versions of Windows, and only as a download from Microsoft, post installation.

So no I'm not in anyway suggesting Microsoft re-architect Windows as a Linux distribution. I'm suggesting that Microsoft make POSIX tools an integral part of the OS, like they are in OSX. For example, making bash the default shell, providing cmdline tools like powershell cmdlets to manage the system from the command line, providing a useable terminal etc. Basically similar to what cygwin and msys provide today, but better and with deeper integration in the OS.

Lately everyone seems to be convinced that we're witnessing the death of the desktop computer, but I wonder if this could be partly due to the lack of options in this market. Apple and Microsoft have both dropped the ball here. Apple has eliminated hardware options that power users are looking for, while Microsoft still doesn't provide a decent POSIX environment or even a passable terminal.

I honestly wonder what the world would look like if Microsoft were to suddenly switch focus and deploy a version of windows with full POSIX support built in, a decent terminal, a first class package manager, and a decent app store. Instead they are removing features like the start button that confuse existing users, and adding a Metro UI that power users don't want.

Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical, but I think we would be witnessing stronger desktop sales if Apple and Microsoft were providing options that users actually wanted.

I'd like to believe that if Microsoft were to add POSIX support, and a decent terminal as part of the default Windows installation it would go along way to improving their perception in the minds of technical users.

It isn't only about shaving milliseconds off your coding. I realize this is mostly anecdotal, but I find when I'm editing in vim or any good IDE, I can focus more on the algorithm and less on the act of typing, and a deeper focus on your program (i.e. data structures, control flow, etc) rather than on typing, does have an advantage.

Holding down the left or right arrow key while waiting for the cursor to move to the end of a line, or reaching for the end key is distracting and interrupts concentration, even if it is brief. Waiting for a cursor to move puts a greater strain on working memory because it means maintaining state information, in memory, for a longer period of time. While these distractions are somewhat minor for a single line of code, they really add up when you're' coding for 8 or 10 hours a day. In fact, I find these distractions add up to the point where I need to be editing in Vim or a good IDE to get in a state of flow.

Now, before someone calls me out on it, I'd also suggest that I don't believe using vim or an IDE increases the load on working short term memory. When you're initially starting out with a new tool, obviously it does increase the working load on memory, but once the key bindings are committed to muscle memory then, almost by definition, you're no relying on working memory.

As much as I want to like Android, this is the type of experience that just makes me want to head straight back to Apple. If Google can't even get their their flagship product's launch day store working properly, do I really want to trust their customer service if I break my phone, or their ability to manage an entire mobile ecosystem?

After owning early Android devices and being incredibly disappointed at the experience (crashes, incompatibilities, lack of software, poor battery life, lack of promised updates) I swore off getting another Android device for a long time.

In the meantime I've owned apple products, and always been extremely happy with the overall experience. With the Nexus 4 announcement, I've decided to give Android another shot. As I said earlier I really want to like Android, but it's stuff like this that makes me have second thoughts, and reconsider just getting an iphone 5.

In my opinion this is a huge failure on Google's part.

My understanding is that the android api has improved recently with respect to the ability to support these types of apps, but for whatever reason there's still a noticeable lack of these apps.

Speaking for myself, one of the main reasons I chose an iphone+ipad over android is because I love watching indie films, and iTunes is great for this. Their content library includes so much stuff that just isn't available anywhere else. Being able to instantly start watching a high quality version of a relatively obscure indie film can currently only be done on an apple platform (please correct me if I'm wrong here).

I would love it if iTunes was available on other platforms, but I can't see it happening. I don't understand why no one else has been able to secure these content deals that Apple seems to exclusively hold.

I realize this is anecdotal, but I spent about 2 years using powershell exclusively, instead of mingw/cygwin, and I during that time I would always keep one or more powershell windows open. I see no reason to believe that anyone with bash, etc experience would not use powershell the same way. Imho it worked well as an interactive shell, its biggest failing was Microsoft's awful console window that hosts powershell. I would be really happy if Microsoft provided something better by default, like Console2 - although that program has it's own set of problems too.

The wrong startup, for the wrong person, can be just as soul sucking as a large corporation. There's plenty of startups that I would never want to work for. This suggestion that corporations are inherently bad and startups are inherently good is overly simplified, and very naive. Google, Apple, and Facebook I'm sure all have employees working on their TPS reports as well. In fact, I'm sure they have security guards, lawyers, and janitors many of whom enjoy their jobs, and add value to the world, despite not being software developers.

I guess I just find the attitude that everyone should be a developer working 80 hours a week for a hot web 2.0 startup very troubling. I worry that some of us have some strange delusions of grandeur. Is the CEO of the next Instagram, working 80 hours a week, really living a better life than the guy next door? In the end, if you're living a life you enjoy, what differences does it make where you work?

For example, the following code does not give me any auto-completion suggestions in eclipse or in vim:

  str = "hello"
  test(str)
  
  def test(val):
    val.[TAB]

While I love vim, I can't imagine using it to write anything significant in .NET - the lack of auto completion and an integrated debugger is a deal killer for me. I'd love to hear the author, or anyone else, elaborate on what kind of setup they use for writing .NET code in vim (note that I already use the vim plugin for VS, I assume this isn't what the author is referring to though)

Did you miss the video in the article? - The one where the iPhone scrolls as smooth as butter, and the other phone scrolls slow enough to make me wonder - is it frozen?

FWIW this has been my experience with Android as well. Obviously not every web page is like this, but even if 5% of the pages out there do this - it's a serious usability problem.

I just don't understand how the scrolling performance on android is still so inferior to that on iOS, especially when comparing devices where the droid has significantly higher hardware specs

I find it interesting that a lot of folks in this discussion seem to accept that an IDE is advantageous for cases involving a large code base or a statically typed language. Why is an IDE any less appropriate to use with dynamically typed languages? A lot of the niceties provided by a good IDE for statically typed languages are still available for dynamically typed languages. For me, the case in favor of using an IDE is the same regardless of the language. The "killer features" an IDE provides are: autocompletion (i.e. intellisense style) and code analysis as you type. I see no reason an IDE cannot provide these features in a dynamically typed language.

Serious question, to those of you who believe an IDE is not useful for dynamically typed languages: Without intellisense like capabilities, how do you remember everything in the language's standard library and for that matter any non-standard libraries you use? Looking up a method or property in the documentation everytime you want to use it seems horribly inefficient. That's the type of job that is perfectly suited for a computer. It seems incredibly ironic to me that computer programmers are manually performing steps that a computer could easily be performing for them. As Albert Einstein said: "Why should I remember anything if I can just look it up?"

As some background I think Vim is a great editor - I use a Vim plugin in Visual Studio all the time, and I often use Vim for editing simple files. I think the addition of omnifunc in version 7 brings Vim a lot closer towards becoming an IDE. Unfortunately Vim's omnifunc capabilities are limited. Contrary to what you'd be led to believe by a lot of well meaning folks - Vim's omnifunc capabilities w.r.t python are nowhere near as capable as the same functionality found in Visual Studio or Eclipse.

I tried an experiment, wondering if I really was more productive in an IDE, and timed myself coding the solution to a couple of simple problems, using python in Visual Studio - I waited two weeks, so the solution was no longer fresh in my mind, and then coded a solution to the same problem again using Vim (note that I even gave Vim the benefit of the doubt here by using it second). For every one of the problems I tested I was significantly more productive in an IDE - sometimes by a factor as high as 2 or 3 times. Anecdotally I think the two features that make me so much faster are intellisense, and code inspection. Having errors appear automatically without the need to run my code is a huge time saver.

I think in the end it's not really about an IDE - it's about the availability of good intellisense like features, automatic code inspection, good refactoring tools, and a good debugger (integrated or not). If those features are available to me when I'm coding then I'll be happy and productive. If they're not then the tools I'm using are inadequate. As much as I would like to use Vim exclusively - unfortunately those features are not available (or do not work well) for the languages I predominately use (C# and python).

If you compare iOS to Android, I think you see the same pattern. One of the reasons the iPhone is so popular is because of the apps, many of which just aren't available on Android. Even when an app is available for Android it often feels like a second class citizen, or an after thought - just as it often does on the Mac.

When I look at the mobile world in this light it seems like we should be comparing iOS to Windows and Android to OSX, but then again maybe I'm just reading into the analogy too much.

It's also worth noting that the pole permits more than one selection, which defeats the purpose of asking, "What is your primary development system".

If we define simplicity as: a plain text interchange format, then clearly by definition a text based shell is simpler.

Piping objects instead of text allows a single command to do more, as it can operate on any of the object's properties that it understands. From a user's perspective, I believe, that this is simpler - however I will acknowledge that this is somewhat subjective. For example: The command ls | sort LastWriteTime would print a list of files sorted by their LastWriteTime. The command ls | sort Length would print a list of files sorted by their size. Doing this in bash is more difficult as it requires additional commands to parse the output of ls.

Honest question: What makes you say that? I've never completely understood why TeX is considered the best at handling mathematical notation. Personally, I've been very happy with the equation editor in Word 2010. I'll certainly acknowledge that there's likely better solutions than Word 2010, but before I invest substantial time learning something like TeX I'd like to understand exactly what it is I'm missing out on.

I've never used Xcode, but I do use Visual Studio everyday, on Windows 7. In the 5+ years I've been using Visual Studio I've been very happy with it as an IDE. Prior to 2008 there were definitely some quirks and stability issues, but as of 2010, I very rarely encounter any issues. I have lots of unix experience, and I can honestly say that Visual Studio is an excellent piece of software, and a pleasure to write software with.

As for your point about Windows crashing, I've never once seen Windows 7 blue screen or become unresponsive to the point where I had to reboot a machine. Disliking Microsoft and Windows are fine, but without some real evidence that Windows 7 is less stable than OSX, or any other OS I think this is a baseless claim.