Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The Need for a Developement Environment
I'm still amazed at the primitive text entry tools engineers use to do design and verification on complex SoC projects. It was clear about 7 years ago engineers want to keep text entry as the way they enter design and verification code when attempts at graphical design entry failed.
I agree that text is the right way to go, but engineers spend more time with an editor than any other program (including e-mail and web browser) so they should at least have a tool with some good features to navigate the code.
Still in 2006, most engineers are using tools that are 30 years old, things like vi and emacs to try to create and maintain projects with a large number of files.
In his column at embedded.com, Jack Ganssle wrote some interesting thoughts about advancing the state of the tools that process the text files to bring them up to the 21st century. I doubt anything will change, but it makes you think.
http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=179101955
It's true we live in a hyperlinked world and working with code should be just as easy as navigating the web. When I see engineers doing
% find . -name \*.v -print | xargs grep my_module
it's extremely depressing.
I'm still amazed at the primitive text entry tools engineers use to do design and verification on complex SoC projects. It was clear about 7 years ago engineers want to keep text entry as the way they enter design and verification code when attempts at graphical design entry failed.
I agree that text is the right way to go, but engineers spend more time with an editor than any other program (including e-mail and web browser) so they should at least have a tool with some good features to navigate the code.
Still in 2006, most engineers are using tools that are 30 years old, things like vi and emacs to try to create and maintain projects with a large number of files.
In his column at embedded.com, Jack Ganssle wrote some interesting thoughts about advancing the state of the tools that process the text files to bring them up to the 21st century. I doubt anything will change, but it makes you think.
http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=179101955
It's true we live in a hyperlinked world and working with code should be just as easy as navigating the web. When I see engineers doing
% find . -name \*.v -print | xargs grep my_module
it's extremely depressing.
# posted by Jason Andrews @ 9:10 PM 
