ianmjones

I’ve been on a mad coding frenzy the last few days, trying to get CaseDetective finished, so every night I’ve been putting in between 4 and 5 hours of solid development time. It’s been great, really getting along nicely, although I’ve had to drop a few features that are just too tricky to implement well in the time I’ve got before I want to ship, I’ll see if they’re asked for before adding them to the schedule for a future release.

Why’s this post titled “Brain Muscle” you ask?

Because, as I’ve been putting in some serious time into development with RealBasic every night at home, when I sit down at work each morning (yes, I still have a day job) and start coding in Informix 4GL or SPL I start off trying to write in a RealBasic style!

I keep tripping over myself by trying to hit tab to auto-complete variable and function names while coding Informix 4GL in vi! Also, I’m forever forgetting to use the 4GL “LET” statement when assigning values to variables as RB doesn’t need such an archaic statement (and nor should 4GL, it’s predecessors didn’t, so why does 4GL?). There are many other little brain muscle things that I have to shake off each morning.

I wish I had all the trappings of a modern and well executed editor for coding in Informix 4GL as I do with RealBasic. I do use vim rather than straight vi, so I do at least get syntax highlighting which is nice, and I’ve got my .vimrc file setup to auto capitalize the Informix reserved words (you can do this with a .exrc for normal vi too). But my time spent using the RealBasic IDE (and I’m only using v5.5.5, haven’t even moved on to the spiffy new RB2005 yet) has made me realize just how much more efficient I could be if I had the right tools.

I wonder what coding EGL in Eclipse for WebSpehere is like, I’ll probably never find out though as the trial download is over 2.5Gb in size! Besides, I see myself using RealBasic more and more in the future, it’s just plain fun to use!