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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Useful tools aren't a priority...
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In Incipient, I read this bit on someone's desire's when using C :
I had an interesting conversation over a French-language programming newsgroup the other day. This person was inquiring about "Edit and Continue", tool support which would let him do simple, one-line changes to his C/C system from within a debugger session, and have the new code execute without needing to exit the program, recompile, rebuild, and start his session all over again.
My suggestion was to write small test programs to test bits of the program in isolation, which would obviate the need for debugger sessions as well as lengthy recompile/rebuild cycles. But, said my interlocutor, the programs I work on are "plugins" which fit within a larger architecture; I have to load the whole thing before I can test my own code. Even better, I replied. There should be a clean and well-defined interface between plugins and core, which will assist you in writing drivers and stubs enabling the above strategy. No, he told me, the "plugin architecture" mostly exists on paper. The program is actually a mess of tightly coupled spaghetti code. At which point I suggested that maybe that should be remedied.
Yes, writing small bits of code and testing are useful. Yes, having a cleaner base system is useful. But also - the limitations of C were his main problem. Had he done this using productive software - say Smalltalk, Lisp, Python, or Ruby - he wouldn't have had this problem at all, would have had edit and continue (only in an actual working state), and probably would have been able to diagnose the issues of the base system more easily. Instead, he got his productivity shot down, and a mass of confusion to boot. As well, that base system isn't really that poor student's problem either, and if my brother in law's Phd process was any indication, it's not as if he had time to deal with it anyway...
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