I have begun to relearn how to program. I used to program in IBM assember and Forth a long time ago but after an illness I lost much of my memory. I am trying to relearn to program now and was wondering what development environment is the best to use starting out. I downloaded both Eclipse and NetBeans and installed them in Ubunut 8.04. I haven’t played too much with either yet. I was wondering if anyone had experience using them. What are their strengths and weaknesses. I started off with Ruby just to keep things as simple as I can and intend to relearn C after I feel more comfortable. I have been using SciTE and it works ok but it is pretty basic. With my memory issues I kinda like something with code completion to help me remember syntax etc. I was wondering what the devs use when coding for blender.
I normally use Eclipse, but I haven’t used it to do any Ruby coding. Eclipse has quite a few nice features, but this does come at a cost. Some people complain about it being a bit slow and bloated. I haven’t had any troubles with it, though.
Eclipse has Ruby plugins. I use Eclipse currently for development with Blender as it has some very nice features. Currently it takes between 110 and 200 MB of memory on my main dev machine - I do have multiple projects open then.
Yesterday I also installed the LuaEclipse plugin to see how well Lua development is supported in it 
Note, I used to use SciTE and ViM a lot before this (still use 'm!), but the indexing services eclipse give are just great.
/Nathan
To look over the edge of Eclipse:
I use Kate or kDevelop (KDE) in linux and crimson editor or Visual Studio in Windows. Just depends on what you want to do and what language you use.
For “easy” stuff like Verilog (a HDL for VLSI) there´s nothing better than Crimson and a commandline compiler on a hotkey. 
I should take a look at eclipse too… once i have some time ^^
Vim ;), no need for large clunky IDE’s
If you code minesweeper v8023 its ok 
If you got to code some huge object oriented stuff or larger projects i would not torture myself with VIM and five secrataries keeping track of all project files ^^ and another 10 people coding the makefiles ^^
Purism is a lifestyle until it gets in your way ^^ (see Windowmanagers vs. Consoles :D)
I use Eclipse for Java, Ruby (Rails) and web related stuff with some php but mostly javascript, html and css. Take a look at aptana for a nice Rails/Ruby enviroment unfortunatly the syntax completion for ruby is lacking badly 
@jesterKing: Can you give me some documentation how you setup the blender sources to be used in Eclipse with C? As I wanted to take a look at the source code but I do not want to grab visual studio.
I am not to concerned about speed right now so if it’s bloated that’s not really an issue for me. I would rather have a little bloat and gain the ease of use while learning.
Thanks for the info jesterKing. Lua? never heard of that language. I assume it’s a scripting language like Python? Is learning Ruby first a mistake? I chose that one on it’s readability. Do you think that my plan of starting with Ruby and then going back to C is a good one? My thought was to try and avoid the problems with memory management while reminding myself of good program structure. I am hoping that with a little practice some of this will become familiar.
I haven’t looked at Kate yet. I will have to google it and see what it’s all about. Thanks.
Would you suggest using Aptana as a standalone or should I use it as a plugin for Eclipse?
I am not planning on doing giant applications just small projects to learn the basics. I had done some reaseach and that is why I downloaded both Eclipse and Netbeans. They seem to be the most comprehensive packages that I could find. Last night I added the ruby support for Eclipse so now I can test them side by side. If I can figure out Eclipse.
For installation Netbeans was easier so far. Ruby was installed right away. No need for adding plugins it is a choice at download.
OK. I updated Eclipse for Ruby, C,C++ and Python. Are there any “must have” plugins that would make my life easier?
Netbeans I also updated for all except Python. Not sure it’s supported.