Whilst I am primarily a DBA during the day, one of the things that I really enjoy about my current engagement is that it has given me the opportunity to dip my toes back in the development pool a bit. I was describing my current development environment to a friend recently and this person was shocked by the details. I realize that in this day and age of code spitters (term coined by Jeff Richter?) and "click through the wizard for instant coding success" sorts of activities that this environment is something of an anachronism.
Without further ado, the o/s:
$ uname -a
HP-UX zzz B.11.31 U ia64 4131905082 unlimited-user license
My "IDE":
$ which vi
/usr/bin/vi
And the compiler:
$ gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: ia64-hp-hpux11.31
Configured with: ../gcc/configure
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1
Yes, I actually have to do things like create a Makefile in such an environment!
Joking aside though, one of the things that I firmly believe is that instrumented code is better code. One of the characteristics of this kind of development environment, I feel, is that it really encourages strongly instrumenting the code. Yes, in some circumstances I could use the gdb debugger, but building proper instrumentation into the code and offering a simple switch to enable it (yes, it is in the release build) works very nicely.
Another thing that some people might find "weird" about this application is that it is a database application (Oracle of course) that contains absolutely no SQL statements. Really. It is a "thick database" application (Toon Koppelaars term?). That is, there are many statements like "begin package.procedure...; end;" in the code. All the real work is done using PL/SQL packages (and bodies) in the database.
As a .NET developer it is often easy to lean heavily on Visual Studio for debugging, but I think Microsoft also agrees with the "instrumented code is better code" philosophy - check out the System.Diagnostics.Trace class in the Visual Studio Combined Help Collection for more information.
Lastly, if I've misappropriated any of the terms above, apologies!
