Regardless of the positive/negatives of VI, VIM, and/or SEU, they are all
still text editors in the end. EMACs come very close to Eclipse (I use it
on my Linux boxes) but it's still not a true development environment. It
is however free whereas Rational is not, nor should it be.
--
Jim Oberholtzer
Chief Technical Architect
Agile Technology Architects
-----Original Message-----
From: Midrange-NonTech [mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of John Yeung
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 8:54 AM
To: Non-Technical Discussion about the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: SEU versus vi and Vim (was: Is COBOL dead?)
On Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Jim Oberholtzer
<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
a large amount of the development on AIX is in COBOL. Up until IBM
provided them with Rational, they did not even have a true development
environment on the UNIX side. (VI and VIM are not development
environments but rather little brothers to SEU)
I'll grant you that vi is nowhere near Eclipse when it comes to providing a
"development environment". But when it comes to ***editing code***, vi is
actually much more capable than SEU, and Vim is even beyond that.
There is a difficult learning curve with vi, including configuration.
If you want to knock it for anything, knock it for that. I fully admit it's
a pretty serious knock. Also, SEU has extensive built-in support for
certain programming languages that vi doesn't, but that is because the two
editors were developed on vastly different platforms.
If you want to program in any of the numerous languages that are available
for (and typically included with) Unix and Unix-like platforms, vi is far
superior to SEU. Even if there were a Linux version of SEU for programming
in bash, C, Perl, Python, Lisp, PHP, and on and on ad nauseum, vi would win
hands down.
(The only argument you would ever get from Unix/Linux users in an SEU vs. vi
debate is "why isn't Emacs in the conversation, because it wipes the floor
with both of them". Emacs is actually capable enough that it potentially
*does* rival Eclipse as a development environment.
But in some ways it's even harder to learn than vi, so in practice people
only master at most one of vi or Emacs.)
John
--
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