[erlang-questions] Use of makefiles

[Armando Di Cianno]

Humor me as I complete taking this thread off-topic ...

On Sun, 2008-03-02 at 21:56 +0000, Alpár Jüttner wrote:
> The real difference is that while Visual Studio or Eclipse want to be
> as
> easy-to-learn as possible, emacs assumes that you are willing to learn
> something new and unusual in order to achieve higher productivity.

I think the difference may be as simple as the naming -- an IDE, by
definiton is an Integrated Development Environment.  For example, you
aren't going to be doing Ruby development in Visual C++ IDE.  The point
is that by it's /integration/ into your language/s of choice, it removes
"distractions" of things you would never use outside the scope of the
language you're writing in.  However, then as scope broadens, you
suddenly need to learn a new tool, or at least a new component.

Emacs, though *incredibly* obtuse at first glance, is -- as far as I can
tell, and have surmised -- an "Extensible Development Environment".
Because it's /extensible/, development itself isn't necessarily stuck to
only the programming variety -- you can have a Latex edit-render cycle
going, you can be running a "Getting Things Done"-style personal manager
-- you can replace /sbin/init with emacs if you really want to.

Emacs isn't necessarily difficult to learn either.  I spent 13 years
using Vi/M, and was happy as a camper.  Erlang, and it's wonderful
support in Emacs, changed that for me -- it gave me the drive and desire
to learn Emacs, finally.

Emacs does have it's blemishes.  In just under 6 months of emacs use, I
can't wrap my head around why people are still debating such things as
wheither Emacs Undo/Redo is superior or not -- to me, if it's not
obvious to everyone, it's then by definition, *not obvious*. ;-)

Just my 2¢,

-- 
Armando Di Cianno
http://dicianno.org/blog
armando@REDACTED
armando@REDACTED