I agree with most of your points, and it makes sense that a number of small apps can be combined in the “Haiku way” to make a development environment.
However, I think that the Paladin/Pe combo (which I try and use) is missing:
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As @humdinger mentioned, syntax hilighting. Language based syntax hilighting is relatively trivial. However, I don’t know how the Pe/Paladin combo would be able to offer hilighting based on other files/classes in the project as somehow it would need to be able to talk to Paladin/whatever process is generating an AST of the files and storing/retrieving it on disk.
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Debugging support. I’ve been spolit with Visual Studio and IntelliJ; I can sprinkle breakpoints inside the code and when execution hits that point I can check locals, watches, stacks, and change the “run from” point. I would dearly love to see the same support if the Debugger could be wired up to Paladin/Pe so I could double click a line inside the Debugger when it hits a breakpoint and see it inside Pe. Of course, this would require modifications to Pe to allow me to add breakpoints.
Please note that if this is already supported, and I’ve missed it, then I apologise and please point me in the right direction!
My main thought process here is making life as easy as possible for developers to adopt to Haiku. If someone with a few hours a week can spin up a development environment, hop line by line through code they’ve written to see where things don’t work and fix it, then I believe we will make more headway in solving Haiku’s issues.
(Again, my $0.02)