>> That's all fine and logical and everything, but there's a nasty snag:
>> Now you have to care about memory management. And there's no way
>> around it.
>
> Forget all you know about classic C pointers;

That shouldn't take long. :-P

> Note that the dispose is gone for good. Shared pointers use reference
> counters to accomplish this feat.

Every time I hear somebody say this, a part of me wants to scream "you 
/do/ understand that reference counting doesn't actually work, right?"

> There's nothing "incorrect" about that way of placing braces, even in
> C++. It's syntactically correct, so say what you will.

Writing the entire program in one source file on a single 435,235,342 
character line is "syntactically correct". But no sane programmer would 
ever do such a horrifying thing. :-P

> The JAVA API has a rich history of deprecating interfaces, deprecating
> interfaces designed to replace deprecated interfaces, and un-deprecating
> deprecated interfaces. I wouldn't be surprised if AWT was among the latter.

Oh yes. I don't remember the names exactly, but I can clearly remember 
how one release of Java had BufferedInputStream and friends. And then in 
the next release, they deprecated that and gave you BufferedReader 
instead. And then in the next release, they deprecated BufferedReader 
and UNdeprecated BufferedInputStream again. (Pro tip: You should /never/ 
need to UNdeprecate something!)

Of course, when I was using Java, it was still quite new. I'd be 
interested to know whether the libraries eventually settled down and 
they stopped doing crap like this, or... ?

> Try Eclipse. Somehow it seems to be the unofficial standard IDE. (Never
> tried it myself in depth though; it has that very special
> Open-Software-Project air about it that somehow makes my skin crawl ever
> since I tried OpenOffice for real.)

Hahaha. "That special OSS air". Yep, NetBeans has that. I don't know 
whether it's the cute but poorly-drawn icons that seem bigger than 
necessary. Or the slightly odd grouping of user preferences. Or the way 
that different parts of the IDE contradict each other as to the current 
status of the code, because each part is out of date by a different 
amount...

> Anyway, I personally stick to IDEs developed by software development
> companies (and I mean companies that develop other stuff besides
> programming languages and IDEs). So far the best IDE experience has been
> Visual Studio for C#. One might snarl at the company's marketing
> strategies, but they seem to know what helps software developers to be
> productive.

I don't know about "what helps software developers to be productive"... 
How about "what makes software developers buy our product rather than 
somebody else's"? Or even "what makes software developers develop for 
our platform rather than somebody else's"? ;-)

The entire MS business model fundamentally depends on getting everyone 
to use the MS platform, and then be locked in. Well, if your platform 
has naff-all software for it, nobody will buy it. But if your platform 
has all the best stuff, people will pay. And then be trapped. So it pays 
(literally) to make it easy for people to write code for your platform 
and only your platform. >:-D

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