It's easy to bash IDEs for their coddling effect, and there are some legitimate arguments against them. But looking up documentation is precisely one of the th

It's easy to bash IDEs for their coddling effect, and there are some legitimate arguments against them. But looking up documentation is precisely one of the things that IDEs are much better at then text editors. Hover over some code and up pops the documentation. Plus you can usually navigate directly to the actual source. Another example is "includes/requires/imports/pick your language". Typing those in manually is simply busy work that distracts from the task at hand. Your other comment is also a strawman: "As soon as you encounter a primitive that the IDE doesn't handle on your behalf, you're lost." It could easily be replaced with: "As soon as you encounter a primitive that you don't know how to enter in your text editor, you're lost." Don't get me wrong. I agree that some aspects of IDEs, especially "Wizards", have a significant negative impact on developer understanding. But they also have powerful positive impacts as well that we shouldn't dismiss so easily.