On 6/24/2013 11:26 AM, Brian Parkins wrote:
This is just fanciful musing on my part. Do you think there would be a demand for a FREE “RDi Lite” product from IBM?
Based on history? No, I do not think there would be any demand for a
free of charge RDi.
I come to this conclusion because I've asked many a co-worker (over more
than a decade) why he still uses SEU. The inevitable answer is that
there is no compelling reason to even /think/ about switching away from
SEU. One might think it's a fear of change, but I hear this argument
from people doing web programming. Surely *they* aren't afraid of change?
I personally think it's a lack of exposure to a real programmer's
editor. When all you have ever used is line numbers, the only thing you
want is line numbers. Heck, I have a hard time explaining why I really,
really miss my Code/400 macros to *this* list. Imagine trying to
explain how much nicer macros make editing, or regular expressions. Or
F3 on an EXSR, or Ctrl-M on an END...
I tried proselytising, but it came to naught. In the end, all these
'fancy widgets' weren't *needed* - look at the billions of lines of code
SEU maintains perfectly well. And frankly, that's an impossible
argument to counter.
So today I make myself available to anyone who wants to give RDi a
whirl, but I don't push the issue. I want to see more people using RDi
but I doubt that forcing them into it will ever work out.
--buck
midrange.com
