Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?

[Elena]

On Dec 6, 4:31 pm, Richard Riley <rile...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
> >> Programming is heavily concerned by drudge tasks, unless someone has
> >> come up with ways to automate them.
>
> > Your world of programming then is very different from mine.
>
> > I've only worked on Free Software projects (some of them linked to
> > academic research, others not), so maybe I'm biased or blind, but really
> > if the amount of "drudge tasks" is so high, it would seem to me that you
> > probably have a real problem elsewhere which would be better solved by
> > eliminating those tasks completely rather then by automating them
> > via IDEs.
>
> >         Stefan
>
> The features in IDEs are generally there for a reason. So clearly people
> do need them. Things like completions, context help, project dependency
> handling, task management etc are all samples of what are "better at
> hand" inside the main coding environment. Emacs does a lot well, but
> things like completion, code navigation, context help etc it is
> poor. That said it makes up for it in otherways e.g org-mode is a super
> development aid.

What I think those who dismiss IDEs fail to realize is that IDEs are
just frameworks for developing applications; these frameworks have
been laid out by more experienced programmers after a lot of
experience on big projects.  The editor embedded in Emacs is a
framework too: a framework for text editing.  Even if you don't go out
of your way to customize Emacs, you can use vanilla Emacs' editing
framework and be sure that it has been laid down by programmers after
decades of experience editing texts of all kinds.  Saying that you
should craft your own IDE on Emacs from scratch is akin to say that
you should craft your own editing environment from scratch.