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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
>