Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by omega_rythm 4173 days ago
I don't think the issue is just allowing proprietary IDEs to interface with Gcc; I think there are deeper issues at play.

Also, I wouldn't say that he's forcing anyone to chop things, he's more likely saying "let's make dishes from recipes which don't require chopping things", but his cooks are still used to chopping. Is there really an alternative to strong "intellisense" and refactoring abilities in IDEs for efficient development ? I don't know. I personally feels that this is a necessary step. Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), has a different view.
1 comments
SupNoob 4172 days ago
> Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), > has a different view.

RMS primarily uses C and Lisp. Lisp source code is a tree already. And C is so simple you can get by with tags and such.

If he was a C++/Java/C# programmer (which he is not) he may have a different feeling on the importance of the AST relative to the risk of Microsoft using gcc with VisualStuio to offer advanced features while by-passing the GPL.

link
omega_rythm 4172 days ago
Of course, but even with lisp you can't (programmatically) work on the code without having that code representation. If it's trivial, then there's no harm in opening it, but RMS thinks otherwise, so there must be something else.
link