[Today’s run: Watson Road, 3.x miles]
Every so often I think about getting more into microcontrollers; PIC, Atmel, Arduino, all that stuff. I have purchased parts and programmer boards and various artifacts. I have even done a few things with them.
More recently the vogue seems to be shifting to FPGAs, programmable gate arrays.
My problem with both of these things is that I don’t like Integrated Development Environments. I really don’t like them. IDEs seem to have come along in the programming world all at once. People doing Java use JBoss or something. People doing microcontrollers and FPGAs use the manufacturer’s IDE. With every $10 gizmo you have to download the IDE software and install it and learn how to use it. It just drags me down.
I’m a command line guy. I don’t want to have multiple windows with checkboxes and little places to put in a list of strange library names. I want a directory structure and a compile command. I’m fine with vi and gdb and gcc. I want to type in the command line that sends the object code down the wire and burns the microcontroller or the FPGA.
Everything seems so strange these days. It’s like I’m stuck in a 1985 time warp.
I even downloaded a command line app for my Android tablet (it would actually be kind of useable if I hooked up a keyboard!)
No more IDEs! Please!