Re: [Dev-C++] Opinion about IDE Develpment Tools for EE

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Michal Molhanec wrote:

> Per Westermark napsal(a):
> > On Sun, 30 Mar 2008, Michal Molhanec wrote:
> >
> >> André Macário Barros napsal(a):
> >>>                    ------xxx------
> >>>
> >>>    I present to you this scenario because of the following:
> >>> In the early 80´s, the old 2-diskettes Turbo C was used in
> >>> EE to develop a lot of systems. BCC (Borland C++) v5&6 provides
> >> Do you mean Borland C++ Builder 5 & 6 ? Borland C++ was name for a
> >> completely different product.
> >
> > No, I really think he means the original Borland C++, i.e. the successor
> > to the Turbo C/C++ since the courses spends a large amount of time on
> > development of command-line tools. Builder puts it's weight on
> > development of GUI applications.
>
> But André mentions that they are using VCL. So it must be Borland C++
> Builder because original Borland C++ does not support it, just OWL and
> MFC. Also Borland C++ 6 doesn't exists, last was 5.5.

You might be correct. It was quite a long time since I dropped the Borland
compilers, and went for Watcom, M$, gcc besides embedded compilers. I did
some work with OWL before switching to MFC.

>
> Also two of those four years they are teaching windows apps.
>
> >>> and, if you are interested to talk about this, here are my
> >>> questions:
> >>>    a) In the showed scenario how would you struct the
> >>>       4-year disciplines?
> >> If I haven't to stick with ANSI-C, I would probably go with .Net/C#, but
> >> I understand your motivation. However the problem is that nobody uses
> >> ANSI-C for GUI development, nor there is pure ANSI-C IDE for GUI
> >> applications.
> >
> > .Net/C# are not suitable tools when the students are expected to develop
> > embedded applications. How many microcontrollers do you think have a .NET
> > support library? The processor may possibly have 1kB .. 512kB of program
> > memory, and 16 byte .. 64kB of RAM.
>
> yes, but as I understand the course description the target of it is to
> write standard PC apps which will through USB or another port comunicate
> with external systems
>
Yes. But C++ means that they continue to build on their existing
knowledge, and that any programming improvements they make can to some
part be "moved back" to embedded programming. If the goal is the CS route,
then they should learn quite a number of languaes - procedural,
functional, parallell, ... By knowing a large number of languages, you can
quickly pick up speed with yet more languages. On the other hand, it may
take somewhile to be even decent in any language at all. I don't want
people who are just so-so with a language to write the OS or the hardware
drivers for a computer I'm going to use.

Remember that graphical applications are no longer limited to PC machines.
You have mobile phones, PDAs, digital books, ... M$ very much wants to
corner the market - or actually all markets - but we are not there yet.
Not everyone want to pay the license for an embedded Windows installation
just because they have built a new copier with touch screen.

/pwm