I've written positively about Microsoft's forthcoming Visual Studio 2010, both here and more recently in a review on The Register. I was interested to see a kind-of follow up from Jeff Vroom, making the case for doing without an IDE at all, at least some of the time:

Emacs, Vim, and other editors have basic syntax highlighting and code navigation for an even broader set of formats despite the fact that they lag behind IDEs in features. Though IDEs offer impressive plug-in capabilities, traditional script and config files seem easier to learn and use and ultimately more flexible.

Command line workflows offer a more flexible, less integrated and less guided approach to development. You learn how to use them one tool at a time. Development and adoption of new tools is usually easier as you are not tightly coupling tools into one complex user interface. Admins, analysts, and designers use command line tools, making it easier for them to work with developers when the IDE is not front and center.

I don't see a lot of designers using command-line tools; but even so I agree that there is a case for a programmer's editor with command-line compilation, rather than a huge IDE. The two things I like most about the bare metal approach are speed and transparency. Speed, because a little editor like Notepad++ starts in a blink, handles large files with ease, and does not get in your way. It is odd that performance still matters so much in an era of multi-processor machines with each core running at more then 2 GHz; but it does. Sometimes I am caught out when a monster like Adobe Dreamweaver grabs a file association for something like HTML or PHP. I double-click a document, and wait impatiently while it loads all sorts of stuff that I do not need, when I only want to make a small text edit to the code.

Transparency is an even bigger issue. If you work with simple editors and build from the command line, you are forced to be aware of what files are in your project, what tools you are using for the build, and what arguments you are passing to them. If something goes wrong, you know where to look. By contrast, IDEs hide things from you, supposedly for ease of use. In the worst case, something like a Visual Studio solution can get corrupted and leave you not knowing how to fix it, other than to create a new one and add back the files as best you can.

A similar problem comes with wizards that generate code. It is lovely to have the IDE generate all that boring data-binding code for your forms, until there is some weird bug, the results are not as expected, and you end up tracing the SQL and puzzling over why it is wrong.

Valid points; but I am still going to come down mostly on the side of the IDE. It is simple: there are so many genuinely useful tools in something like Visual Studio that productivity is better. Things I don't want to do without include IntelliSense and code completion, debugging tools with things like mouse-hover variable values and watch windows, visual design tools that generate a ton of code I don't have to write, various refactoring utilities, and build tools that save having to think about make or Ant. Visual Studio takes ages to load, but once it is up and running you can always press Shift-Alt-Enter and pretend it is a text editor.

I am still wary of wizards though; and I value knowing how to do without the IDE, even if most of the time I end up using it. As one of the comments to Vroom's piece notes, if it gets to the point where your programming skills are really IDE skills, you should worry about being so deeply tied to a single platform and way of working.

Eclipse Galileo is out now. It is remarkable: 33 projects and 24 million lines of code, according to the press release. Perhaps the two biggest features in this release are support for Mac Cocoa - in order words, proper Mac support - and PHP development tools. All open source, all free.

Unsurprisingly, Eclipse appears to be the most popular Java development tool, and if you extend that to IDEs based on Eclipse, its dominance is overwhelming. Its obvious rival, Netbeans, has improved greatly in the last few years and may be better for some purposes; but it looks unlikely to catch Eclipse, and the impact of Oracle's impending acquisition of Sun is unknown.

Eclipse has also influenced other development tools, forcing vendors to offer more for free and to improve their extensibility. You can see this effect in Visual Studio, for example, with its Express editions and both technical and licensing enhancements to its extensibility in recent times. Microsoft may say that this would have happened anyway, but I am doubtful. Eclipse changed the game.

Still, there is something that I've always found intriguing about Eclipse, which may be a weakness in its business model (if a free platform can have such a thing). I put this to Executive Director Mike Milinkovich and he responded robustly, which I like because it usually means I've asked a good question.

Eclipse is a a tools platform, not an IDE, and member companies build their own products based on the shared platform. Examples are Adobe with Flex Builder, IBM with Rational Application Developer, Zend with Zend Studio, and Embarcadero with JBuilder. Each of these companies has a dilemma. The more they invest in the shared platform, the more they collectively benefit by getting features that they do not have to build on their own; but the better the shared platform gets, the more difficult it is to differentiate and sell their commercial products. I asked Milinkovich about this tension and he interrupted me:

That's not a tension, that's exactly the way Eclipse is designed to work. That is the Eclipse business model. Our licensing model and our business model are geared around the notion that we're building an open source platform which then people build products on top and differentiate in the marketplace based on what they do on the proprietary side.

Although Milinkovich says it is "not a tension", Embarcadero CEO Wayne Williams complained about this very thing, telling me that IBM is now pulling back from investment in Eclipse and reserving the best new features for its own products - which, whatever the truth of the matter, IBM has every right to do.

An additional factor is the difference between vendors like Google, which has an Eclipse plug-in for App Engine, but is only concerned to promote its platform; and those like Embarcadero whose business is selling tools. Vendors like Google can improve Eclipse without any threat to their business.

Eclipse is wildly popular, but came last in a recent Software Development Platform survey of developer satisfaction by Evans Data. To be fair, all the products won a reasonably good rating, so we should not infer that Eclipse is poor; it is not. I can understand, though, why some member companies may be happy to see Eclipse rated as good, but not too good, giving them space for their Eclipse-based products; and if this is the case, it may limit the extent to which Eclipse is likely to improve.

It's hard not to love PHP: fast, powerful, and useful for anything from quick web scripts to major applications. The trouble is, PHP is just too forgiving for my taste. I've been working with PHP recently and occasionally made some silly errors (my excuse: it was late). I mostly work in other languages, so from time to time I would forget that in PHP variables all begin with a $ character. In other words, I wrote code like this:

$err = 0;
 if (err)

 {

     print("<b>No match with this username and password. Please try again.</b>");

 }

Unfortunately for me, the code ran fine. PHP sees err as an undefined constant which it assumes has a string value of 'err', so the if condition passes. For those used to strongly-typed languages such as C,Java or C#, this kind of error is unexpected, as in those languages the equivalent code will not even compile. Silent errors are particularly dangerous, since they are more likely to make it into production code with possibly calamitous consequences.

I guess the solution is not to make errors like that; but if you are like me, anything the tools can do to help catch errors is welcome. One possibility is to change the error_reporting value in php.ini. If you set it to a strict setting like this:

error_reporting  =  E_ALL | E_STRICT

then PHP will report likely problems in a manner that even a tired programmer will notice:

Check out the comments in php.ini for a description of the options. You would likely only use a strict setting like this in your development environment, not in production.

A snag with this approach is that many PHP libraries out there do not expect such a strict setting and will throw up all sorts of warnings. It wasn't a problem for me, as on this occasion all the code was mine.

As an aside, I've enjoyed working with PHP. I used to find that it almost encouraged spaghetti code, but the object-orientation introduced in PHP 5.0 has made it easier to structure applications in a way that I like. I've also started using the PHP Development Tools (PDT) in Eclipse. If you use this together with an instant PHP environment such as XAMPP, it is easy to set up a desktop for PHP development with luxuries like syntax highlighting, code-completion, and step-through debugging. Taking all these things together, I've found that most of my objections to using PHP no longer apply.