Tuesday 15 January 2008

Another new feature

So, rb2008 will introduce introspection.

Geoff claims it's for the customers' benefit and there will be much screaming from the gallery that RS should be spending their time fixing bugs instead of adding features.

Of course they're concentrating mostly on bug-fixes but some people believe the new features are marketing-led.

What I ask myself is this. Are they spending time adding the features they feel they need to enable them to fix the bugs?

They've been eating their own dogfood for a while now and may be realising there's stuff it ain't so easy to do in RB and they need a few more features to do some of the things they need to do next.

Remember, writing a toolset exposes you to the unpredictable foibles of other developers, just about as badly as anything I can think of.

If you were building a toolset, might you not find you'd give your eye teeth for features like:

  • Introspection
  • Delegates
  • Control scope
  • destination directory and command line arguments for debug applications
  • plugin debuggin'
  • turning off implicit instantiation
  • namespaces
Is it just me, or are their stomachs just revolting against the lack of meat in the dogfood?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm pretty sure this is driven by their own internal need for it so they can fix bugs and make things work better in the long run.

Unknown said...

Their stomachs are revolting indeed. I'm sure they'll be more productive and accurate with introspection in place.