Re:Couple thoughts from an IBM developer (Score 1)

While I agree in principle about the current practices and the interchangeability of plain text files (proven, I believe, above all through the pipe/redirection system), I don't think that it is necessarily agreeable with a good software development process.

There are two major things I believe are at fault with text file source code:

1. Your software design is dictated by the language definition, not by your desired software engineering princibles. For example, C++ and Java has no way of preventing one object instance from manipulating private members of an instance of the same class. And there is no unbreakable way to tell which class may access which memembers of another class. Programmers (ok, I) are in general lazy and/or have limited capacity/knowledge of the system, and I have met few programmers who read and follow all specifications and documentations at all times. Mostly it's about doing what the source files permit, not the documentation. So it's up to the tools and the discipline of the programmers to maintain the quality. I find source file tools still a bit lacking, and as for the programmers discipline, well... :) Tools that help the programmers adhering to specifications and rules should be essential for quality development.

2. Working within file scope, or file-to-file scope (e.g. class diagrams in Together), only gets you so far. Software design is often about higher level constructs like patterns, modules, protocols, event chains etc where one property affects a lot of source elements. A tool that manages this permits (a) more rapid development and (b) automatic relief from a lot of potential bugs.

I believe that tools that assist these high-level constructs will be an expanding market but are too limited today, instead being in the way, which is what you seem to have experienced with Visual Age.

Together is the tool I know of that has walked the farest along this road, but they (a) aren't broad-scoped enough, and (b) show some problems with using text source files. At the same time though, they prove your point by more or less requiring parallell work with an external IDE, which works nicely thanks to using plain text source files.

Anyway, perhaps I only long for more helpful tools because my brain is getting too old for complicated stuff. :)