Re: Wolfram Workbench user experiences
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg88362] Re: Wolfram Workbench user experiences
- From: Michael Weyrauch <michael.weyrauch at gmx.de>
- Date: Sat, 3 May 2008 06:14:52 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <fvegvm$5f6$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Reply-to: michael.weyrauch at gmx.de
David, I like Wolfram Workbench a lot. For me the workbench editor is much nicer than using a notebook directly (in particular I have some difficulties with the "smart" autoformatting in notebooks). The colour highlighting and bracket checking in workbench are working particularly nicely and usefully to my opinion. All my function definitions are then loaded in the accompanying notebook after each editing automatically, and then I work with my functions in the notebook just like with built-in functions. That is I edit in the workbench only such functions which I will use more often. Things like plotting results and all that which requires constant fine-tuning are done in the notebook itself. Of course, all such things are largely a matter of taste, and your personal working style, but I like this division of my work into the core routines which I develop in workbench and then working with them in the notebook. I also tried occasionally the profiler, which was not so much of use to me, and debugging is also not so easy so that I mostly still work with Print[] statements if things go wrong. (But I am not a professional programmer, but a scientist just using Mathematica to solve problems. I would guess that real large scale projects with more than one person working on them and the requirement of professional source code management cannot be done efficiently without such tools as workbench.) Since I often have to connect to remote kernels, I certainly miss the possibility to connect workbench to remote kernels. (At least I didn't get it to connect to a remote kernel until now.) So, in the wake of some recent discussions in this newsgroup about the Wolfram User Interface, I would say, workbench is just a great addition to the possibilties to work with Mathematica. Different people are working differently, and it is good that different working styles are catered for. (Certainly all my tasks could be done without workbench.) I am certainly looking forward to workbench 1.2 and its enhancements... Michael David Bailey schrieb: > I would be very interested in other people's experiences with the > Wolfram Workbench. I must admit that I prefer to use the frontend as my > 'IDE', and the workbench seemed fairly alien when I tried it. > > David Bailey > http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk >