Had a rather frenzied conversation with a self-proclaimed agilist this lunchtime, during which I admitted that I couldn’t claim complete mastery of any particular IDE.
“You’ll Never Be A Good Agile Developer!” came the immediate pronouncement.
Take that! Put me in my place!
Apparently, in the mind of this young guru, mastery of every keyboard shortcut of an editor (although which particular editor this person had in mind remained unspecified. He’s a Ruby fanboy I believe, so I’m guessing that it would be something Mac-ish) was a prerequisite for agile development.
After a while, the conversation changed tack and this intense young thing–bemoaning the overall state of the I.T.world–pronounced that it would probably be better if he went back to Uni. and completed his Arts Degree.
Stepping back through the mirror, I thought it would be fun to think about all the editors that I have failed to adequately exercise over the years.
Ignoring non developer-oriented things like Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker, and oddities like runoff/[nt]roff/TeX and even odder things like Literate Programming’s tangle/weave I came up with this:
| TOPS-20/SOS | TOPS-10/TECO | edlin | ed/ex/vi | Turbo Pascal |
| Turbo Prolog | USCD p-System Pascal | USCD p-System Modula-2 | Inmos Occam Transputer Development System | Macintosh/BBEdit |
| Macintosh/Alpha | VMS/edit | Think/C | Apple Macintosh Programmers Workshop | Metroworks Modula-2 |
| XEmacs | Project Oberon | Netbeans | Eclipse/MyEclipseIDE | IntelliJ |
| VisualAge for Java | JDeveloper | JBuilder | SunOS EditTool | Visual Studio |
(there are others…I’m pretty sure that the Simula 67 system I used for a while had a weird development ‘environment’ that I didn’t really delve into; ditto for the eiffel system I used…)
Given all this, it is patently obvious that I’ll never be A Good Agile Developer, but let’s remember the Agile Manifesto, which states (in part):
…we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools…
