I assume your college buddy was too depressed to comment.
I can advise that the new code editor (2012) is an improvement over the older (2008) in that the syntax highlighting is no longer so slow that it grinds your system to a halt.
However, it still can highlight code which is perfectly valid and compiles fine, and fail to highlight code which is wrong and will not compile.
Some of the problems I can think of off the top of my head:
- Lack of built in functions
- Built in functions are not robust enough e.g. EscapeHtml does not escape all characters used in XSS attacked
- Intersystems have resolved 1 of the 4 support queries I have logged with them
- Unpleasant behaviour like
- open file stream
- write to file stream
- save file stream
- open file stream in new process and intermittently find file stream is empty (but put a pause in the process and it works...)
- Really slow queries when compared with any variant of SQL I have used, data I expect in sub seconds can take minutes!
- Compilation does not always work first time despite what studio reports. (record so far is 3 compiles in a row before a single cls compiled successfully)
- Errors report lines in the compiled code not the code that was actually written
- Documentation is not well indexed and does not sort by relevance to the query