Olin Lathrop wrote:

> I think there are three broad catagories of use for PIC programmers:
> production, professional development, and hobbyist.
> 
> Production:
>   - Does the same job repetitively.
>   - Probably embedded in a production test/calibration fixture,
>     mechanically making this easy is a plus.
>   - Must be automatable from command scripts or another program.  Native
>     program rarely used directly by the operator.
>   - Operator is relatively unskilled, low paid, often not on site.
>   - Reliability is critical.
>   - Price is not a high priority.
> 
> Professional development:
>   - Used by engineer or technician as needed.
>   - Should be scriptable so that can be automatically run as part of
>     firmware build script if desired.
>   - Must be a reliable tool that can be counted on.
>   - Should just work, lots of fiddling to get working not tolerated.
>   - Price is medium priority, must be good tool to be considered.
> 
> Hobbyist:
>   - Price is top priority.
>   - More inconveniences and unreliability tolerated as price get lower.

IMO that pretty much sums it up. I'd probably add that a professional
development programmer should provide possibilities to integrate into the
most commonly used development environments used by professionals in the
targeted area. That may be covered by "scriptable" or not, depending on the
environments. 

An example is MPLAB... it doesn't lend itself well for integrating
scriptable tools. I once tried to make my make scripts MPLAB-compatible (so
that I can run them both from other, "script-friendly", environments and
from MPLAB), but that seemed to take a lot of work, so I abandoned it. Who
wanted to work with MPLAB had to maintain their own MPLAB projects and keep
them in sync with the make files :)

I don't know how common use of MPLAB is among professional PIC developers,
but it's probably significant.

FWIW, it was easier to integrate ICD2 programming into my make scripts
using AutoIt3. (ICD2 is almost not a professional development programmer...
:)

Gerhard

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