Someone wrote a post a while back about this topic and called it the grep test. See: http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/12/grep-test/ http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/

Someone wrote a post a while back about this topic and called it the grep test. See: http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/12/grep-test/ http://jamie-wong.com/2013/07/12/grep-test/ It's funny that you mention the Java ecosystem as one of the worst offenders, since the nature of the language itself and the culture around best practices in the early days should have put it in a particularly favorable position here. This is covered partly in another great post titled "Java for Everything": http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything.html http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything... Unfortunately, I too find most Java projects are developed in a way that make them completely unapproachable without the assistance of an IDE. I'm secretly hoping that Microsoft announces first-class support for Android app development in VSCode, given that the team's overall gestalt is on producing a nimble, code-oriented editor. They may not otherwise have any incentive to make that kind of thing happen, except that I think it would be a real boon for VSCode adoption. Anxiously waiting to see if there will be any interesting announcements to come out of their developer conference this weekend, although I'm not counting on it.