No More Text!
The idea of IDEs not being forced to rely on text files has been
popping up in several of the weblogs I read.
While I think Alan has part of the reason correct (there's a lot of
infrastructure dedicated to dealing with text files), I don't think he
has it all. There are definately some major
advantages to putting things in plain text files, which seem to be
being ignored
For instance, my company
has moved from a binary resource format to a text-based
resource format precisely because of the advantages it brings.
(Well, okay, we never went with the binary format, but that's because
the people making the decision saw the problems it had at previous
places.) Those advantages being:
- No tool/vendor lock-in.
- Easier to fix when something goes wrong.
- Easier to see the differences when something changes.