Re: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch

["Trevor Perry" <tperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

First, I did not imply anything - let alone that an IDE can prevent logic 
errors. Which leads me to believe that your approach is simply 
undisciplined.

If you are coding with the "edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit, compile, 
run, fail, debug, edit, compile", this is not necessarily WRONG - just an 
undisciplined approach. An IDE provides you more tools to code with, verify 
being one, of course. It does not MAKE you a better coder, it provides means 
for you to be a more efficient coder. What happened to code walkthroughs? 
Did they go out of fashion because we got a faster server?

One of the things that WDSc does is to take most of the development 
enviroment OFF the System i. Unless we have a development server, chewing 
cycles for additional compiles because of undisciplined programming 
techniques can impact the business bottom line. WDSc can help that - by 
using the PC as a development tool. What if an order is not taken, because 
the CPU cycles are re-compiling because you forgot something in your first 
or second or third or.... pass? Why not code with more discipline, and get 
it right earlier?

I just think that we have it easy - the System i works well serving multiple 
tasks - production AND development. And we got lazy in our coding efforts. I 
used to teach a class called "Programming for performance and 
maintainability". What I found was code that was hard to read by the 
programmer who WROTE it - and maintainability was improved by several 
things. One was better documentation (IN THE code) - WDSc helps with this, 
because you can see it clearly and can see MORE of it. Another was spending 
time understanding the code before diving in and edit/compile/edit/compile - 
with the ability to see more of the code, more source members, and tools 
like verify, WDSc helps us be better programmers.

I guess the point is, just because you buy a new car does not make you a 
better driver. But, some of the new inventions in the car will certainly 
help you when you crash.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: <AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 1:44 PM
Subject: RE: Saving the System i: Fight Rather Than Switch


> Trevor Perry wrote:
> > >If you are still coding in "edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit,
> > compile,
> > run, fail, debug, edit, compile" mode, then it would seem you are using
> > WDSc
> > as you did with PDM - this is not a true Integrated Development
> > Environment.
>
> Rob Berendt wrote on 15/12/2006 02:39:22 PM:
>
> > Some might argue that you use Verify, instead of Compile.  Granted the
> > first time you run Verify you will not be impressed, but it has to cache
> a
> > bunch of stuff.  Repeated attempts to Verify should run faster.  Now,
> > we've got plenty of horsepower in our development lpar that I often just
>
> > compile instead of verify.
>
> Verify can be nice if you don't want to use up processor time on your
> System i.  It doesn't really do anything substantive to change the
> development process Trevor mentions, however.  It just adds a couple of
> steps:
> "edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit, compile, run, fail, debug, edit,
> compile"  becomes "edit, verify, fix syntax errors, run, fail, debug ...".
>
> Trevor seems to be implying that using an IDE can prevent logic errors,
> which IMHO doesn't follow.