The animated story of Rapunzel out this year was very apropos. The Disney story is about this long-haired Rapunzel who has spent her entire life in a tower. She must venture into the outside world for the first time.
Does this sound familiar in our programming realm? We are using our life long tools to program in our tower not venturing out into the world. Well guess what? There a great tools in the world other than a line by line editor, VIM, EMACS, VI, Notepad, AccuTerm, and the plethora of others. We are just guessing here but aren't you the programmers stuck in the proverbial tower.
We have been preaching about Eclipse IDE for over 6 years now. Our XLr8Editor is finest Eclipse based editor in the world. Of course, we can say that, because we are hearing from many people that have switched. We are getting a few people a week that are interested in our XLr8Editor whether by trial or actually purchasing a license. The programmers that ventured out of the programmer tower to try our product tell us we have a "excellent product".
For the rest of you, it time to wake up before the wicket witch can cut short Rapunzel's braided hair and you will never be able to leave the programming tower.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Dodge a Bullet
"Dodge a bullet" in this context is not losing you source code due to a backup failure or human error. I recently had a backup failure and I totally overwrote our entire JavaScript directory with an outdated version. Our backups had the same outdated version. So where do I go to find the missing source. I had not updated our version control in a while, so was I totally screwed?
Nope, not a all. I had made a 100 million dollar bet on a tool set called Eclipse. Our Java programming staff had created an environment within Eclipse where failure as described above was not a option. I require all of my programming staff to use XLr8Editor plug-in for Eclipse for UniBasic code editing in Universe/Unidata or in this case JavaScript.
Eclipse has this built-in mechanism that keeps at least 50 copies of your changed in a local database. All my programmer had to do was look through his or her history and use the compare editor to find when the program had been changed and merge those changes.
So while not doing the proper procedures in-house, a business decision made in 2005 saved me and my programmer a lot of heartache and recriminations. Our Java staff will have in a month or two to get a synchronization process with the database to your local workspace that requires no programmer interventions to work just like Eclipse does.
You too can get XLr8Editor for a mere $49.00 per workstation. This is money well spent when you can lose hundreds of hours of programming time by stupid mistakes which clearly I am guilty of.
Nope, not a all. I had made a 100 million dollar bet on a tool set called Eclipse. Our Java programming staff had created an environment within Eclipse where failure as described above was not a option. I require all of my programming staff to use XLr8Editor plug-in for Eclipse for UniBasic code editing in Universe/Unidata or in this case JavaScript.
Eclipse has this built-in mechanism that keeps at least 50 copies of your changed in a local database. All my programmer had to do was look through his or her history and use the compare editor to find when the program had been changed and merge those changes.
So while not doing the proper procedures in-house, a business decision made in 2005 saved me and my programmer a lot of heartache and recriminations. Our Java staff will have in a month or two to get a synchronization process with the database to your local workspace that requires no programmer interventions to work just like Eclipse does.
You too can get XLr8Editor for a mere $49.00 per workstation. This is money well spent when you can lose hundreds of hours of programming time by stupid mistakes which clearly I am guilty of.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Bugs: Don't Ask Don't Tell
Somewhere along the line, I decided if the client did not ask about bugs I did not tell him that I found any. Why on earth did I think this was a good policy for the company or my client?
Bugs are things that produce an incorrect or unexpected result. Is that why my client has me working in that code? Of course, it is.
My job in the first place was to write "perfect" code. Well, I know that is not going to happen. As a matter of fact, a few months ago one of my clients was amazed that the code worked the first time and that had not happened in twenty plus years.
That got me thinking about why do have buggy code? First reason was easy, I'm the tester. We all know the programmers make the worst testers. The second reason is that I have nothing like Visual Studio for the Windows programmers, or do I?
Since my company, U2logic, produces an editor called XLr8Editor for Unidata and Universe that allows you to see you variables in an outline instead of using the -X or -XREF compile option. XLr8Editor allow you to type control-k to go to each instance that variable is used. There is a built in search engine where I can find the exact lines where a piece of code or a variable is used.
All of things and many more features have made be a better coder. Keep reading in the next few weeks and months, XLr8 family will be enhanced to make all of us better coders.
Bugs are things that produce an incorrect or unexpected result. Is that why my client has me working in that code? Of course, it is.
My job in the first place was to write "perfect" code. Well, I know that is not going to happen. As a matter of fact, a few months ago one of my clients was amazed that the code worked the first time and that had not happened in twenty plus years.
That got me thinking about why do have buggy code? First reason was easy, I'm the tester. We all know the programmers make the worst testers. The second reason is that I have nothing like Visual Studio for the Windows programmers, or do I?
Since my company, U2logic, produces an editor called XLr8Editor for Unidata and Universe that allows you to see you variables in an outline instead of using the -X or -XREF compile option. XLr8Editor allow you to type control-k to go to each instance that variable is used. There is a built in search engine where I can find the exact lines where a piece of code or a variable is used.
All of things and many more features have made be a better coder. Keep reading in the next few weeks and months, XLr8 family will be enhanced to make all of us better coders.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Not Invented Here
I was speaking with a would be client the other day trying to sell our XLr8Editor for a mere $49.00 per workstation. He is questioning me on how and the whys which make this a step up for him and his shop in my opinion.
But it struck me that this sale ways not going any where because he or they had not invented this technology. What is it with these Universe and Unidata shops that build there own editor or their own form editor or the next big thing for them?
I think there are two parts to the answer to the question I have posed.
The first part has to do with the age of many of our fellow programmers. Many of us are over 40 (I'm being kind) and have been using U2 or Pick for 10, 20 or 30 years. We are stuck in our ways. We have always done it this way or we just do not want to change. Think about it. Are using a Accuterm, or EditPlus, or wIntegrate, or Notepad, or something you cobbled together? Really, this is equivalent to a Java programmer using VI to write Java which would never happen.
The second part is we have never had a tools to do what we needed. We have ED or AE and that was it. Sure, there where some others, but only System Builder has survived. So, if we need to do it we invented it, period. Otherwise we had to buy a tool was generally out of the question due to budgetary constraints or we were unable to figure the dang tool out.
What we should be doing is what we do with Windows or Linux. We get trials for the software and really try them out diligently. So why are we not doing that? That is the question you all need to answer. My answer is of course, try our tools at U2logic.com. We do allow trials.
But it struck me that this sale ways not going any where because he or they had not invented this technology. What is it with these Universe and Unidata shops that build there own editor or their own form editor or the next big thing for them?
I think there are two parts to the answer to the question I have posed.
The first part has to do with the age of many of our fellow programmers. Many of us are over 40 (I'm being kind) and have been using U2 or Pick for 10, 20 or 30 years. We are stuck in our ways. We have always done it this way or we just do not want to change. Think about it. Are using a Accuterm, or EditPlus, or wIntegrate, or Notepad, or something you cobbled together? Really, this is equivalent to a Java programmer using VI to write Java which would never happen.
The second part is we have never had a tools to do what we needed. We have ED or AE and that was it. Sure, there where some others, but only System Builder has survived. So, if we need to do it we invented it, period. Otherwise we had to buy a tool was generally out of the question due to budgetary constraints or we were unable to figure the dang tool out.
What we should be doing is what we do with Windows or Linux. We get trials for the software and really try them out diligently. So why are we not doing that? That is the question you all need to answer. My answer is of course, try our tools at U2logic.com. We do allow trials.
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