[brecklundin]

Just thought I should add that I was being snarky "on porpoise" with my comments. I completely hear what you both are saying. But at the same time, I felt your comments are reactionary rather than thoughtful.

I really do know that IDE's have become vastly better than the "old days" but do not take my reference to those days to mean I am not current and up to date. I will admit I decided this will be my final year keeping all my IDE/dev environs current.

To this day my heart is with Borland's Turbo Pascal 3 compiler. It was not near what we have today but it also set the table for what we have today. Then, believe it or not was the IDE for the original FoxPro when it was from FoxSoft not post MS destruction of the language, which lead to most of the way IDE's work today. First thing MS did was merge the FP IDE with the VB IDE in the early/mid 90s to create a pretty nice, at the time, dev environment. Borland's Turbo C++ was super as have been others over the years...and today it's amazing what is out there free for people learning or doing small projects.

My point of the thread was really to open the idea to spitball the idea of break the current conventional wisdom that such code evaluation and even debugging (to a lesser degree because of the built-in syntax checking, etc...) But there are still a lot of people in my age bracket who do still get our hands dirty with code rather than "just" design work. To my thinking these devices could be a boon to developers, coders and designers alike. I am not expecting code to actually run on them but just the design aspect offers a nice way to investigate that design in a way many are still happy with...

I was hoping the idea that devices with a (or just all of them) language's lexicon in firmware plus even various modeling tools could be embedded as well. I have no idea where it could eventually go...if it helps remember there is/was an iRex device designed specifically for pilots that worked quite well from what I read...no reason a device could not be created in the same spirit...

In the mean time, just remember that actually seeing the sun, is a nice thing and unless a person has a very high end transflective laptop there is no reasonable way to work outside or even in the shadows.

And remember how often have some of your solutions to a problem come from working away from your workstation...it can help to shed the overhead of the development environment during certain parts of the creative process that software engineering/development is today...and also not all software is done in an assembly line fashion.

I was hoping there would be those who could see past the sterile antiseptic world that coding has come...in many ways the idea of team projects has ruined creativity. Today it is do it the way of the collective or go away...that is NOT the world I come from...then again it can depend on the company one works for, if you are not a freelancer that is, which is all I do now a days...never was a cubicle or AmeriCorp sorta guy anyway and walked out on several pretty nice situations because of the politics designed to force conformity.