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Re: Wolfram Workbench user experiences

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg88407] Re: Wolfram Workbench user experiences
• From: David Bailey <dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk>
• Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 06:09:13 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <fvegvm$5f6$1@smc.vnet.net>

Thanks for everyone's response - and maybe there will be more to come.

My general feeling is that I would be sorry to see various features 
randomly scattered between two vastly different interfaces. Thus I don't 
really want to have to use WB to get full debugging, but FE to get 
characters such as \[Breve] to display correctly. Use WB to set up 
documentation, but FE to view the result, etc.

Having two interfaces seems to make it much harder to describe how to 
perform a task (or indeed to teach Mathematica) and generally seems to 
lead to a loss of focus.

 From the responses so far, it would seem that WB mainly offers enhanced 
debugging and profiling, and one has to ask whether these features would 
not be better pulled into the main product.

Furthermore, editing a .m file in Mathematica seems to be a much more 
satisfying experience than using WB, because Mathematica can save and 
restore heading and text cells as comments, so that you get most of the 
richness of a notebook with all the advantages of a text file. (I would 
recommend anyone who maintains package files to check out this feature) 
I would like to see this concept enhanced further - say to include colour.

Much of my work involves J/Link accessing compiled Java code. In a way 
WB might have been ideal for this type of project, but because I was not 
starting from scratch, I already had a structure to assemble this code, 
and figuring out how to use WB to perform the equivalent operation 
seemed formidably hard.

David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk