[erlang-questions] Erlang IDE

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

Hi Jeremy,

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Jeremy Ong <jeremy@REDACTED> wrote:
> If you still want an IDE, ask yourself what functionality the IDE is
> supposed to provide beyond a basic editor. ... Personally, I doubt it will ever be
> necessary.

Being a developer for erlide (http://erlide.org), I obviously have a
different opinion about this. :-)

The main thing that an IDE can help with is integration: instead of
starting five different tools, you just start one. One can also write
glue code that merges data from different tools into something more
useful than the parts.

The second thing is that it can provide basic services for tools, so
that it is easier to develop new ones. For example, access to already
parsed and annotated source code or to a stream of tracing events from
a live node.

Of course one can get by just fine with simple, separated tools.
Sometimes though, it helps to be able to not have to bother about the
low-level details (what were the arguments for tracing this function
again?) and focus on the project itself (because tracing can be
enabled from a context menu, for example).

[Someone may wonder if erlide provides all this: not all of it yet.
But we're working on it and it improves all the time.]

best regards,
Vlad