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Posted by Michael Trausch on 03/31/06 22:32
Marc wrote:
>
> Would you have continued to use Dreamweaver at your employer's if you
> had the choice?
>
At that time, probably... but since then I've found things that I really
like a whole world better. Granted, there is a bit of a learning curve
involved, but after that initial curve, the things you find that you're
able to do and the speed with which you're able to do them is totally
worth it.
There are a lot of things that I can do, today, in very little time,
that I couldn't have claimed to be able to do with Dreamweaver. And I'm
sure that somebody, somewhere out there has written some sort of SCM
interface for Dreamweaver, but if they have, I haven't seen it, and I
rather like never leaving the keyboard to begin with.
I can safely say that I'd not use it again if I had a choice between it
and the tools that I use now for development.
[snip]
>
> Syntax highlighting is the most useful tool a programmer can have, but I
> agree with you that it won't fix all problems. I still regularly fall
> foul of mistakes like missing the semicolon of the end of a line of PHP.
> Textpad doesn't tell me otherwise.
>
> I use Textpad, as I'm not linux-savvy yet, and then use WinSCP to upload
> my scripts.
>
One of the neat things with some environments (such as Emacs) is that
when you miss a semicolon, it throws off the auto-indenting in a logical
pattern. So you can use the combination of syntax-highlighting and
automatic indent to see if there are mistakes somewhere. Very excellent
tools, indeed.
One other really awesome thing that you can do, if you use a Subversion
repository for your code, is to attach a PHP syntax validator hook to
it, and then you'll really be able to catch things like that quickly.
My typical work "flow" tends to be:
* Make some changes to a file.
* CTRL+x v v
* Enter commit message.
* CTRL+c CTRL+c
* If the commit succeeds, then the syntax is good. If not, then
I have a syntax error -- before I even launch the script.
I like catching things as early as possible, and with the right set of
tools, you can do just that.
- Mike
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