Re: Debugging best practices under Linux?

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Enrico Colombini <erix@erix.it> wrote:
> I've used a lot of IDEs and I can occasionally appreciate a good debugger,
> but I've never felt the need of either for Lua. I can't pinpoint exactly
> why, but with dynamic languages I feel more comfortable and productive with
> just a good text editor.

Mostly I agree, for a given value of $good_text_editor (and that's a
very personal choice, so I'm not even mentioning brands or trying to
compare them) And yes, it should be quick on its feet!

The sophistication of Eclipse is possible because of the simple static
nature of Java; it is harder to do these tricks with a dynamic
language. Not _impossible_, just significantly harder.

The problem with IDEs is that they develop imperial ambitions and want
to take over your workflow (Visual Studio, anyone?) As soon as I have
to create a project to test a simple idea then I'm put off.

I like a good editor which does the basic integration (knows about Lua
errors) and is smart enough to be taught to capture a debugger if
needed.

steve d.