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Qualities of a good IDE

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MonkeyK

Programmer
Sep 25, 2002
3
US
Can someone point me in the direction of technical references that describe qualities of good IDEs? The information would would be particularly valuable if it made reference to productivity gains for a specific quality.

I am trying to convince my company that we need to improve some of our older development environments, and would like to have a comprehensive set of criteria/features by which management can evaluate the "goodness" IDEs that we have.

My goal is that by convincing management that there are benefits to be had, they can begin to think about IDEs that would provide those benefits.

The development environments that I want to improve are mainframe based (PL/I).
After I started working with VB, I began to notice how unsatisfying mainframe coding is. So I started to create a list of things that I think make a good IDE.

Feedback:
-Color coding
-syntax checking
-code beautifying
-plain english error messages

Provide tools to organize a project:
-Allows definition of a project
-project search

Makes tedious things easier:
-macros, preferably paramatarizable, so that I can choose different files for the macro to act on.

I intend to take my list to the powers that be within my company, however I am hoping to lend myself more credibility by refering to published documents.
 

Hi MonkeyK,

other possible criteria for a good IDE would be:

* source code control system
* debugger

Gareth
 
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