Re: Why no TextMate for Linux?

On 2010-03-11, David Masover <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I'm much more interested in it on a personal level. Switching text editors at 
> this point might be, for most of us, far trickier than switching OSes, and 
> could be almost as bad as switching keyboard layouts. (Dvorak, anyone?) By 
> picking a proprietary technology, you're doing several things that I can't 
> really see being worth the risk:

Just as a data point, I still use vi as my primary editor (nvi by preference,
I dislike vim).  And yet... I have TextMate, and BBEdit, both, on my Mac.

>  * You're locked-in to a single provider -- in this case, a single _person_.
>    - If Allan Odgaard doesn't want to implement a feature you want, you're 
> SOL.
>    - If Allan Odgaard can't fix a bug that's annoying you, you're also SOL.
>    - if Allan Odgaard wants money for a new car, you might find the next 
> version of TextMate costs significantly more.

Sure.

But if the CURRENT version meets my needs, great!

It's not as if most people can realistically get a real feature change
into vi.  Even most programmers would be unlikely to find it worth the
time and effort.

>  * You're tied to an OS which is notorious for breaking backwards-
> compatibility.

lolwut?  I have things from OS X 10.0, written for PowerPC systems, which
still run on Intel in 10.6.

I'm not seeing a real issue here.

> - The next version of OS X is as likely as not to break the current version 
> of TextMate.

You have any evidence for this?  I've been using OS X as one of my desktop
platforms for about a decade now, and thus far, I've had VERY few programs
broken by upgrades -- and those were always things which I would have expected
to break, like low-level hacks into the window manager or something similar.

>    - Once you do upgrade, the new version of TextMate is as likely as not to 
> refuse to work on old versions of OS X, so you'd better upgrade all your boxes 
> at once.

Again, this claim "as likely as not" seems pretty implausible to me.  It's
extremely unusual for anyone to make a tool like this not work on at least the
two or three most recent revisions.

Do you have any kind of data to back this claim up, or is this just generic
FUD?  If we're gonna be doing FUD, how about I warn people that they shouldn't
be relying on Ruby, because a new version of Ruby might break existing
scripts?

Oh, wait.  That actually *happens*, so we don't worry about it.

>    - If you don't like the new OS X, for whatever reason, some new version of 
> TextMate might force you to upgrade anyway.

But you don't have to get a new version, if the one you have works.

>    - Switching OSes -- to Linux, to Windows, to Plan9, to whatever -- is out 
> of the question for you.

I would consider that pretty normal for a lot of tools.  I expect to have
to switch tools when I switch OS's.  There are exceptions, but by and large,
the default I expect is that any given program will probably be specific
to a target platform.

>  * You're a programmer, yet you can't program your own programming tools.
>    - I don't care how extensible it is, you don't have the source.
>    - Look at the tricks tools like Diakonos can do. Can TextMate do that?
>    - Basically, TextMate may be at the top of the heap now (though there's 
> certainly room for debate), but if it continues to innovate, you can't be a 
> part of that. I would hope tools like Diakonos would win out in the long run, 
> because people who use them would inevitably contribute needed changes -- if 
> there was ever a "scratch your own itch" app, a text editor is it.

I have never found myself with any complaints about the available options,
preferences, or features in either BBEdit or TextMate.  I use vi because I
like the raw speed, and don't need the flashy stuff, but I've never found
myself wishing to extend either of them.

>  * Again, a SINGLE PERSON is responsible for the destiny of this editor.
>    - If Allan should be hit by a bus (not that I am wishing this on anyone), 
> what happens to TextMate development?

Presumably it goes to the estate.  I dunno.  I don't see this as a big deal.
Again, if the current version works for me, I don't care about future versions
for a long time.

> Still, think about it. Would you choose a proprietary programming language? 

If it was the right tool for the job, yes.

> Library?

If it was the right tool for the job, yes.

> Framework?

If it was the right tool for the job, yes.

I'm making myself an iPhone app.  I dunno if I'll ever even get it to the
point where I'd submit it to the app store.  I want it for my own use.  It
is heavily tied to several proprietary frameworks.

So what?  Nothing else lets me do what I want.  So I'll use Objective-C (not
technically proprietary, but functionally so), a number of proprietary
libraries, several proprietary frameworks, and a series of proprietary
development tools.  Because they let me do what I want.

> If not, why not, and why would you use a proprietary text 
> editor, or debugger, or _any_ proprietary programming tool?

I would use them because they had features I wanted or needed which justified
their cost.  If I were doing something that was targeting Intel chips, and
I needed the best possible performance, you BET it'd be using the Intel
proprietary compiler.  If I were targeting Cell, and I needed the best
possible performance, you BET it'd be using the IBM compilers.  If I had a
short deadline for debugging something, and a proprietary tool had a feature
that would let me debug it, yes, I'd use a proprietary tool.  Purify does
stuff that most other allocation checkers I've tried didn't.  If I desperately
needed to fix an allocation bug, I might well tell management "get me a
license for Purify or move your schedule".  (Well, probably not, since I'm
pretty good at those anyway...)

I don't have a problem with proprietary tools, IF they do their job well
enough to justify the hassles.

> I generally don't bother people about developing on OS X. It's annoying, but 
> most of the Ruby stuff is going to be general Unix stuff anyway, not Mac-
> specific. But then, switching OSes is easy when your tools are portable.

It is usually a bit of a tradeoff.  I'll accept some non-portability of tools
to get jobs done sooner and with less effort.

I am a moderately experienced Unix geek, but the shared disk used by the
various computers in my house is attached to a box running OS X Server,
because the cost of my time to set all that stuff up correctly is an
order of magnitude more than the cost to have something where I click the
"yes, make this available to Windows too" button.  ...Which is gonna go
away now that the two people who had Windows machines have moved out.  But
I'll still probably use OS X Server, because it does what I want and stays
out of my face.  Good enough.

-s
-- 
Copyright 2010, all wrongs reversed.  Peter Seebach / [e-mail]
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