Pathfinder Development Blog

I always suspect that part of the problem is that people come to xcode from other environments, expecting to use the same workflows that they previously had, and it just doesn't work. Personally, I don't think it would be a bad thing if Apple made a bit more effort to reach out to programmers coming from other environments, but honestly, I suspect that they figure that any programmer not capable of dealing with this is probably not a great loss for the Apple ecosystem.

It is a point worth remembering that all of Apple's own software is built in xcode. That all by itself shows that the app isn't fundamentally broken, even if one may feel like there is room for improvement.

On a sightly different note, I'm always fascinated by this type of rant, of a programmer complaining about their programming tools. I mean, you're a programmer, if you don't like the tools, roll your own that are better. Or write some scripts that ease the pain in the tool, or adapt a 3rd party tool to do the task. For example, this guy could quite easily prepare an iPhone dev plug-in for Textmate, if xcode really is as bad as he says. Here's an example:
http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/11/iphone-sdk-testing-with-textmate-gtm/

Complaining about dev tools for me sends up a whopping great big red flag that the programmer isn't as good as they think they are.

ruby:

http://eigenclass.org/hiki/rcodetools

http://railroad.rubyforge.org/

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/12/read-the-source-luke-a-readers-guide-to-the-rails-source/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37105/how-do-you-actually-read-source-code

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(you'll see lots of questions on stackoverflow: navigate/inspect/read source repo's)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623906/programmatically-inspect-net-code

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/935516/how-does-macos-developer-navigate-large-code-base

python:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/213898/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1568544/given-a-python-class-how-can-i-inspect-and-find-the-place-in-my-code-where-it-is

emacs, vim, ctags, etags,

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1220456/navigating-effectively-through-source-code-in-linux

I'm not quite sure why this style guide is more noteworthy than all the other ruby style guides out there.. e.g.:

http://www.caliban.org/ruby/rubyguide.shtml

and

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/10/elements-of-ruby-style/