Reputation: 11299

Is language adoption driven by the productivity of its available IDEs?

Simply put, if the designers of a new language want it to gain adoption and interest from the largest group of programmers possible, should those designers build a highly productive(Intellisense like features to begin with) IDE to encourage the adoption of a language?

Upvotes: 3

Answers (9)

Norman Ramsey

Reputation: 202505

History shows that the language comes first and the IDE follows. Instead of building an IDE, build the killer app (Unix, mobile code, Rails, ...).

Upvotes: 2

Nosredna

Reputation: 86196

I'll say "yes." If not the productivity of, at least the presence of an IDE will bring in IDE-lovers and is unlikely to discourage command-line or Vim enthusiasts.

If not a full IDE, at least syntax coloring.

Evidence: Fully half the SO questions tagged Objective-J ask about syntax highlighting.

Upvotes: 1

rlovtang

Reputation: 5060

In an environment where developers are used to good IDEs it is harder to advocate the use of a new language if some of the IDEs people are using lacks support for the language.

E.g. on the java platform there is a lot of new languages that could be used in conjuction with Java, like Groovy, Scala, JRuby etc. Up to now it has been a problem if you want to start using Groovy and some of the developers use Eclipse, because the Groovy support in Eclipse hasn't been that good (luckily that is changing right now).

Upvotes: 0

rlovtang

Reputation: 5060

The syntax of a new language can mostly be learned in a few hours. What takes most time and effort is to get to know the APIs. To have a good IDE with IntelliSense makes it so much easier to poke around and learn the APIs than looking up in documentation.

Upvotes: 2

OMG Ponies

Reputation: 332571

It's in the best interest of adoption to have tools available that are accessible and can automate much of the overall process. The less time it takes to do something, the more time can be spent on actual development.

Cost for the IDE is the other factor that will affect management buy-in. Some places are OK with the write-off, most would prefer to keep overhead to a minimum.

Upvotes: 2

John

Reputation: 17471

Yes.

Even if you've created the most useful, most advanced language on the planet, there's no way I'm going to waste my time coding in it if I have to use notepad.

Upvotes: 3