[mercury-users] IDE...

[Jonathan Morgan]

As usual, I will prefix this post by saying that I do not speak on
behalf of the Mercury developers.

On 18/10/06, RMJ <radse1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It's quite unfortunate to see on this users-list how
> facts are ignored in favor of personal taste & style.
>
> Indeed, it's only a matter of taste to use
> IDE/GUI-tools but you can't impose your personal style
> on the absolut majority of programmers in this world.
>
> Enhancing productivity or not plays no role. IDEs and
> GUI-tools (you can add good documentation, humble and
> helpful community, ease of
> reading/writing/debugging/extending/use and
> production, etc.) are among the most important things
> that make a programming language popular (if you are
> lucky).

A few facts I happen to know:
1. I believe the Mercury team would have liked to add a Visual Studio
plugin for Mercury when they were part of the .NET languages research
project, but they couldn't get Microsoft funding for it.
2. Last year one of the Honours projects was to develop an IDE for Mercury (see
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/honours/projects2005.html#proj014).  This did
not get taken.

In general, not developing an IDE is not "imposing our personal
style".  Mercury is a research effort, and the developers are paid to
research.  I do not see that there is a great amount of research
potential in developing an IDE.

The facts are that Mercury relies on users to develop usability
extensions that they think necessary.  Mercury developers have a large
number of things that they would like to do, but they have to either
fit these things around their research/teaching/etc., or persuade
honours/summer/graduate students to do them.

> If you want to keep Mercury in it's current tiny
> circle of users before it disappears in a decade or
> two, then don't bother. But I think Mercury deserves
> much better.
>
> It has been two weeks since I stumbled on Mercury for
> the first time. I'm discovering, experimenting and
> trying to be objective as much as possible in order to
> see if it's a good enough language to use to implement
> my experimental project (which probably will end up in
> the academic research field if I wasn't satisfied
> enough with the results).
> The last time I used vi was 6 years ago and I don't
> mind using the CML So the only problem that bothers me
> after reading your postings is: If Mercury's community
> didn't grow up in number, then it'll stay as a vague
> academic study material that too few students read and
> forget in a glance".

However, it is likely to continue to attract research funding, and to
be used for research projects.  Here at Melbourne and elsewhere in
Australia there is a large amount of research in constraint logic
programming.  This may not help the average user who wants an IDE, but
I imagine it gives Mercury some of the funding and support it needs in
order to remain a going concern.

Jon
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