VIPC Review
Volume Number: 12
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: Tools Of The Trade
VIP-C: A Different Kind of IDE 
Program design combining visual and textual programming methods
By Edward Ringel
Why VIP-C?
To answer this question, a little personal history. I have been programming the
Macintosh on a part-time and hobbyist basis for about 10 years. I have spent much
time and money trying to find the “right tools” so that I could have fun and be
productive. I’ve bought and used some great products; I’ve also bought and used some
real stinkers. Any programmer who’s been at it for a while will admit to a similar
experience. Time and money both wasted and well spent have given me the following
perspective:
1. Procedural languages are all the same. Current Macintosh implementations of C,
Pascal, FORTRAN, and BASIC are all able to carry out most program-ming tasks.
2. There are good ways of developing libraries of usable, extensible, reusable code
that don’t rely on an object-oriented paradigm.
3. Any given object-oriented program-ming system takes a long time to learn. Once
learned, that system may be quite productive. However, skills acquired in one
system or library are applied only with difficulty to another.
4. Productivity depends upon the complete development environment, rather than
only upon the language.
5. A good GUI builder/app framework is worth every penny spent.
6. I want to save time and develop a good product rather than adhere to an ideology of
programming technique.
What does this have to do with VIP-C? The death by asphyxiation of my two
favorite tools, THINK Pascal for environment and ViewIt for a GUI builder, put me on a
several-month expedition to find a replacement. The ground rules for the search: I
would be willing to change from Pascal; I would be willing to learn an object-oriented
paradigm if it were comprehensible to mortals; I wanted an environment/GUI
generator that left me with source code at the completion of development (I was
unhappy with the prospect of “shared libs from hell” after the company that made one
I was using went out of business and I had several thousand lines of code dependent on
unsupported, dated, unalterable products); I would not work with an environment that
required me to learn an elaborate series of sub-commands to get simple jobs done.
I chose to work with VIP-C and Metrowerks Gold. Everyone knows about
Metrowerks; they do a great job, and nothing else needs to be said. VIP-C, however,
was new to me. I have used it for several months and have been impressed with its
utility, its ease of use, and the tight integration between the GUI and the actual
processing of data. It is not perfect, and it is not for everybody, but it is hard to beat
for turning out a finished app without sweating out every last detail. It does this
without being object-oriented. It leaves me with source code at the completion of the
project. I have ultimately come to view some of the peculiarities in the environment
as useful. As of this writing (December 1995) the current release of VIP-C is 1.5.3.
I have also used VIP-C 2.0b21 for several weeks as a beta tester. Both releases
support 68K and PPC Macs. Version 2.0 of VIP-C (and of its companion product
VIP-Basic) are set to debut at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco in January 1996. As
such, I have not reviewed features of version 1.5.3 that are not supported in version
2.0, and have not obsessed about problems in version 1.5.3 which have been resolved
in version 2.0.
[As this issue went to press, in January, the Mainstay folks were just putting the
finish touches on version 2.0, so some facts may be slightly different; but they’ve told
us that Ed’s description is substantially correct. - man]
What is it?