What's So Great About IM?
 

I keep hearing about how great IM is and how teens prefer it to email which is for old fuddies.

I've never used IM, as we block it at work.

What's great about it? Why is it better than dashing off a one-line email? Do you have to be logged on and watching to get the message?

I would love an IM system that was internal for my company. Pop it up on their screen so they MUST see it. Sort of like running accross my factory and putting a Posit™ on their screen (which I do all the time):)

But I don't want my guys chatting with their buds all day either.

Developers use it here....seems to be quite effective. Not sure what flavor they've gone with. I beleieve there are packages that can be interanl only and pretty well regulated.

We use jabber on my team. I find the persistence annoying, personally.

Because its instant. Email is like snail mail when comparing it to IM. You dont have to 'open an email' or wait to send/receive it. Its a real time chat box.

Kinda like a telephone...

Used to have to wait 40 minutes for a baked potato.
If I wasn't at home when somebody called, they'd just have to wait until I was.
I'm getting old.
:sigh:

I remember trying IM about 7 years ago when it first came out. I found it annoying.

You can only send messages to people who are online, and you can tell who is and isn't before sending a message. It pops up in front of everything else. So if you were typing a line of code, all of the sudden you have a read-only IM box beeping at your keystrokes.

well there are various IM programs that are better or worse. Yahoo lets you send messages to people who aren't there and they'll get them when they come back. It also only blinks the window in the taskbar when a message arrives, no window stealing allowed.

We use it at work all the time since the IT dept is spread out between 4 buildings and since so many of us are on the phone a good portion of the day.

I use iChat all day with my boss... of course, he's in Madison, WI and I'm in NE. It works well. The few other people on my list of contacts are also programmers, so if we chat at all, it's about some new Apple thing, or we're asking each other questions. Sort of like two nerds on the phone... ask the question, get the answer, end conversation.

You can program on an Apple?

BASIC, right?

;)

I hate IM, I find it instrusive...I'll be busy trying to get some work done and BAM, here comes an IM from some idiot...we have it at work but I no longer use it, I refuse. It pops up in front of everything, no way to stop it. If someone needs to talk to me RIGHT NOW, then pick up the phone. I especially like when someone IMs you to "call me"...give me a break! Ok, end of rant.

I didn't get enough sleep last night...

Others might not truly know. And I know just a liitle. But yes, you can program on a Mac. Codewarrior for us older guys with OS before X, and then I think they can program directly in Unix in OS X.


As for IM. Never use it. Even the sound of email can be annoying.

Another kind of nice thing about IM is a certain cavalier attitude towards the "old fashioned" overhead of a conversation. In the good ol' days, if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to go over to their house. There's about 40 minutes of socializing that you have to do in order to get down to business. You know, "How are the kids? How's the dog? What did you ever do with that old horse of yours?"

To some extent, when we shifted to telephones, there was a lot of that overhead that was retained. You'd call someone and say, "Hey, this is Dan, how are you?" And then you jabber about meaningless stuff for 5 or 10 minutes before you bother to get to the point.

With IM, you know who you're talking to, so there's no need to beat around the bush with empty social banter. "Got those numbers yet?" "Bill and I are going to Buca di Beppos -- Join us for lunch?"

In some circles, phone etiquette is also becoming simpler, I guess, so the phone generalization is too broad. A lot of times, I'll call people and just start right in. I recognize Erik's voice on the other end of the line, and I know that he has caller ID, so he knows who I am already. We talked yesterday, so I know how his kids are doing, and what he did with that old horse, so we skip all of the meaningless banter, and I just start right in.

(shrug) Or something.

Some Apple programming is as lame as BASIC, and I'm totally against programming proprietary code. I won't touch Cocoa... willingly. Java on OS X though... there's nothing better :) Get all the benefits of the built-in JRE prettyness, plus everything is already there.

The real question... is how can people program on windows? Unless it's VB? (eww, I just got a shiver from typing that) :p

I like it at work, the biggest problem I have is running different clients for different groups of people I talk to.

If I get an e-mail I may not get to it right away, and when people call me it breaks my concentration and I lose 10 minutes of productivity for a 2 minute phone call.

When I get an IM it just pops up on the taskbar and I can get to it when I have a chance to take a quick break from my train of thought, without switching gears completely like I sometimes do to read e-mail.

I have to be effiecient, that way I can get in some Pelican time too. :)

I program on the zOS servers (biggest mainframe IBM makes). For my particular language, I code and unit test on the workstation, then FTP to the host. Compile, Bind, run.

legion, you should build an ant task for that...

Check out Lotus Sametime. We use it and pretty much everyone loves it. It stays confined to your corporate network, which sounds like what you are looking for.

I've been developing w/Java exclusively on a Windoz box for the last 7 years. Every 18 months or so I upgrade to a more powerful workstation (Dell laptop), install Java SDKs (multiple for different customers), cygwin, gvim, jad :), and some IDE. Ready to roll in an hour. Key is to use environment setup scripts vs. system variables. Very low stress.

IM can be annoying when you don't really "need" it. I use Trillion and when developing/debugging offsite it has proven to be invaluable. I recently integrated several Java apps with jabber and it's pretty cool.