1/30/2002 9:36:37 AM, "Andrzej Jan Taramina" <andrzej@[...].com>  
wrote:

>  IDE's hold out the marketing promise of turning a 
>  junior/intermediate/less experienced developer 
>  into a veteran hotshot.  
>  Unfortunately the marketing hype does not deliver
>  in the real world. Caveat 
>  Emptor reins supreme.

Sigh,  the hype merely promises to make the less experienced 
developer reasonably competent, not expert.  VisualBasic and 
VisualStudio utterly and completely dominate the market for 
development tools, so clearly they are "good enough" for the vast 
majority.  The real experts, of course, find them clumsy.

I personally think that the approach of HotMetaL and XMetaL is about 
as optimal as it's going to get:  Provide a visual interface that 
makes the easy stuff very easy, a tree views and tags-on view that 
puts the markup structure in the picture for another 15% or so of 
cases where that is important, and a raw source view for that last 5% 
where you simply have to understand the spec in detail.  Last I used 
the thing (some years ago) VisualStudio had something similar for 
code.   The alternative of using the fully-idiot-proof tool for the 
80% and emacs for the last 20% is that, as has been mentioned, the 
more idiot-proof the tool, the uglier the code it tends to generate. 
(MS Word's bizarre HTML being a case in point).



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