I am new, I am here.
As a student of the metaphysical, this makes for a pretty good mantra-esque type of saying!
I've looked in this forum plenty of times before. I coulda swore I already made an account, but I suppose this is the first!
I pay the price for choosing Code::Blocks over Visual Studio - I've had to "learn extra" to bypass certain scenarios where a library was made working perfectly for Visual Studio yet did not work with Code::Blocks. Er, perhaps I mean to say GCC, or any of the other tools, but still it blows my mind that Visual Studio tends to have this special treatment of a sort.
I am strangely bound to Code::Blocks, and I cannot bring myself to really use others. It was one of my first Open Source discoveries, and the idea of using it captivated my imagination:
In an apocalypse, open source must be nearly the only way. We can master C++, but what of our development environment? Code::Blocks seems the obvious choice, as your programming mastery could directly be applied to the IDE itself. It is but one more piece of freedom in the ability to add or improve any open tools, as you could go deeper in terms of what you can modify/create: The compiler and linker, the operating system, a programming language, the many drivers, and the hardware itself.
We could rebuild society from ruins, and even make the process of obtaining a computer to be so extremely independent and self-sufficient. Electricity, hardware, and software can allow us to bypass the old ways of mining, refining, of building the microchips and components, and to automate the whole process so that an individual may never need to rely on a corporation again. It is the software's openness that makes this clear, and the hardware must come next. To have a powerful IDE alongside a powerful language allows us to grow past what simply cannot be done in a proprietary environment which literally would fail or malfunction in times of need. Though it is the language that provides so much, the environment being so extensible is a powerful amplifier as it may be the window into which all other projects - compilers, drivers, languages, operating systems, etc - reside within view.
Just as the electricity, hardware, firmware, and OS provide a window from bottom-up, the IDE allows us to more easily dig back down and reconfigure the old and the obsolete. No matter how sophisticated a proprietary IDE might be, if it is not open source then it cannot achieve things the same way. We cannot look inside a proprietary IDE in order to learn from how it works, make our own, or improve it - it simply does not allow it to happen on purpose. A shallow, obsolete purpose.
In the apocalypse it is the open which will remove so much guesswork from the rebuilding process: bypassing the obsolete, wasteful monetary reasoning behind making something closed in the first place. It is truly an amplifier to humankind's survival that there is an open source alternative to any and all software and hardware. The closed will simply make us reliant on a breakable, unfix-able realm where exact computer models and OS choices would be disturbingly needed to ensure the proprietary solutions keep functioning. No one could easily be motivated to develop new hardware knowing that they cannot look inside these closed tools in order to make them work for the next iteration of computers. Too much would have to be built from the ground up without being able to learn from the mistakes of the past. It would instill the mindset of closed-source going forward, causing the rebuilt world to potentially suffer the same fate yet again.
Yes, I imagine using Code::Blocks in an apocalypse. xD
