#22801 - MonkeyBoy666 - Tue Jun 29, 2004 7:31 pm
How do you feal about people using development tools in order to make development easier. (such as dragonBASIC, HAM,...) Do you feal this is taking an easy way out or... well i don't know that si why i am asking.
so basically how do you feal about these programs
#22804 - poslundc - Tue Jun 29, 2004 7:54 pm
I feel they are probably good for little projects; things where it is evident that the library definitely meets the requirements of the program you want to make.
If you at all intend on doing anything much larger and more sophisticated than, say, a basic pong game or a slideshow program, though, you are better off getting your hands dirty in plain C/C++ and assembly, because in the long run you will have to unlearn most of the stuff covered by those libraries anyway.
Dan.
#22813 - dagamer34 - Tue Jun 29, 2004 10:12 pm
They make it easier for someone who has never had to deal with limiting hardware. However, sooner or later, they find out that these kits are more limiting that the hardware itself and soon start from scratch.
VisualHAM is still a nice environment, even without the HAMlib. I still use it.
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#22872 - Abscissa - Wed Jun 30, 2004 6:07 pm
Anything that makes development easier is a good thing. If that wasn't true, then nobody would be using C, Asm, or even Hexadecimal machine code (Even hex was just a way to make bit-by-bit programming easier) - We'd all be still flipping switches to input individual bits on our "Altair 2004's" if easier wasn't necessarily better.
That said, a lot of RAD (rapid application development) tools do not make certain types of development easier (sometimes not even possible). The bottom line is, if it makes what you're specifically trying to do easier (taking into account things like learning curve, price, etc.), then by all means go for it.
Any of the people that religously stick to the whole ideas of doing everything command-line, no IDE's, etc., just for sake of being a so-called "REAL programmer" are basically just the Amish of the digital world.
#22874 - poslundc - Wed Jun 30, 2004 6:22 pm
I think the more relevant issue is how far under the hood do you want (need) to get in order to accomplish the task at hand.
Several components of my GBA game have required hand-coded assembly, and I would not have attempted those in C, let alone with something like Dragon BASIC or whatnot.
My map editor I have running on my Macintosh, though? Written entirely in Objective C, with all of the overhead that creates. When I can get away with even higher-level than that (for things like bitmap converters, font utilities, etc.), I use PHP.
Dan.