The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

CodeWright discontinued

Borland just notified its CodeWright customers in an e-mail that the software has been discontinued. Existing support contracts will be serviced but there will be no new development. Nevertheless, they still _sell_ CodeWright licences... huh?

This comes as a bit of a surprise since they had produced a new "CodeWright for .NET" version soon after acquiring the software from Premia. Guess it's getting harder and harder to compete against Visual Studio on one hand and the myriad of free/cheap editors on the other.

Anyway, this was one of my favorite programmer's editors and I thought others might be interested since many here are weird enough to become emotionally attached to their tools. ;)

Chris Nahr
Saturday, April 10, 2004

Probably cutting-down their competition?

Knowledge Seeker
Saturday, April 10, 2004

Perhaps Borland is to become the SCO of the developer tools market. Stop making anything of value, get rid of everyone but the lawyers, and start pushing writs out the door.

Dreams aside, it is really sad to see the death of a once great software company, especially when there is STILL a market for good, low-cost, easy to use, development tools.

HeWhoMustBeConfused
Saturday, April 10, 2004

Hopefully, they'll do like they did with Interbase, and release the code as open source instead of just killing it, so at least someone can try to keep developing it.

Fred
Saturday, April 10, 2004

Codewriht has been by favorite editor. i guess the fact it had cot sold to Borland escaped me.

It is quite obvious that, since CodeWright was much superior to the comparatively crappy Borland editor, Borland bought it with the only intention of destroying the product and creating a monopoly for themselves.

The Borland of old does not exist. All its key members have left to microsoft. Let's show our support for the Borland of old by boycotting Delphi and using exclusively microsoft products.

Tony Chang
Saturday, April 10, 2004

>Borland bought it with the only intention of destroying the product and creating a monopoly for themselves.>

Ah, yes, the unstoppable Borland juggernaut with their monopoly on editors, printing money faster than anyone can count it.

Please.

I suspect that the reality was that the market for a "better" editor was slim to none, and Borland bought it for reasons other than to sell it.

Tim Sullivan
Sunday, April 11, 2004

"it is really sad to see the death of a once great software company"

Companies cannot be great. Great products come from great people. When those people go, so goes every shred of the greatness.

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Borland: eliminating editors, one at a time. Y'all remember they bought Brief, then discontinued that (to make room for CodeWright perhaps, but IIRC there was a good separation in time). I believe Visual SlickEdit is a small company, might they be next?

Dobie
Sunday, April 11, 2004

I think discontinuing CodeWright is a reasonable business decision.

There are lots and lots of code editors on the market. Many of them are free.

It is very likely that CodeWright was not a very profitable product.

The products that are profitable for Borland are probably JBuilder, Delphi and C# Builder.

They probably bought it in order to use it in future versions of Delphi, JBuilder, C# Builder, etc.

It's a perfectly rational, normal decision.

Max
Monday, April 12, 2004

Starbase bought CodeWright. Some time later, Borland bought Starbase. CodeWright, I'm sure, was not a key factor in the decision--StarTeam and Caliber RM were Starbase's prizes.

It is sad to see CodeWright go, although I switched to Visual SlickEdit when CodeWright went .Net and SlickEdit went Eclipse.

I think there will always be a market for top-notch editors. For people that spend all their time in an editor, $300 is trivial for a superlative tool.

Rob Warner
Monday, April 12, 2004

I started using CodeWright under Windows 3.1 and I thought it was great. I have upgraded twice since and each time I've found that for each new feature added that made life better it seemed like there were two features added that made things more cumbersome. The Visual Studio integration never worked right for me, and each new release had more doo-dads encroaching on valuable screen space. As CodeWright got incrementally more bloated, Visual Studio got incrementally better until one day it just didn't pay to exert the extra effort to keep both tools running at the same time. I reprogrammed a few Visual Studio keys to match my CodeWright habituated fingers and made do.

Oh Well
Thursday, May 6, 2004

Six years ago, I did an evaluation of editors for the company where I worked, primarily for use by SQL Server developers since all we had at the time was notepad or Query Analyzer. The two biggies in the Windows world were Codewright and SlickEdit.

Since then, I've tried Ultra Edit, Multi Edit, Text Pad, and some others I've forgotten. SlickEdit is the only one that comes close, but even it's missing a simple operation that I used many times a day: justifying selected text (left or right). This omission is just bizarre for something that must at least be decent text editor. Other things missing are the ability to sort based on more than one set of columns at a time, etc.

Codewright still rocks and in my opinion remains far and away the best editor for SQL code development. Get it while you can. Hopefully, it will go open source.

Bill Richmond
Thursday, May 6, 2004

I've also tried other editors, and Visual Slick Edit is the only one that comes close. CodeWright was, and still is, many steps ahead of any other editor I know of. Probably because that's all the original programmers cared about: making an editor.

As a consultant doing short-terms stints at various places with their own full-timer programmers, I indirectly sold CodeWright wherever I went. Sadly, I found that most programmers were very complacent in their choice of tools, even though I often demonstrated how the many superior features of CodeWright helped me fly through any task in any kind of text file (even hacking through binary files).

In the embedded development world, most cross-compilers nowadays come within an IDE for the purpose of tying the the compiler, debugger, simulator, and some wizards into a common GUI. Naturally, the IDE comes with a rudimentary cobbled-together text editor. And most embedded developers thus choose to stay within the IDE to avoid hassles with multiple apps.

Even so, it sounds to me like the CodeWright product (and name) are a candidate ripe for purchase from Borland. The product and name may have value to a small outfit, but not to the likes of Borland. Or maybe there will be a large enough void left by it's absence that a replacement product, perhaps by the original Codewright developers, will emerge.

Did someone say something about emotional attachment to tools?

Embedded Ed
Tuesday, August 17, 2004