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Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosi

Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b. Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most productive. …but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy.

bbrree66 5y ago
Agreed. It's obvious this is written by some pseudo intellectual who wants to feel smart and different by saying they don't use an IDE. Benefits easily out weigh any downsides.
newbamboo 5y ago
“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” Henry David Thoreau One day the IDE will do most of the coding. Users will just click “ok” and spend most of their time asking IT to reboot and reinstall things until it all just works(tm).
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  This isn't an actual verbatim Thoreau quote, it's rather a mishmash of disparate sentences from Walden,[0] so perhaps the use of the quotes is mistaken. The sentences do carry a general spirit, however, which is very nice and pleasing, until you're reminded that Thoreau's rugged existence in nature was supported by his mum cooking him dinner. I would instead offer the following sentence from Walden as a better encapsulation: "The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten." Namely, our arts and crafts come to cater to the alleviation of the burden of our physicality, yet neglect the needs of our spirituality. I doubt that either the command line or an IDE can cater much to spirituality, although I've heard some argue that there's much food for the soul in Emacs and Lisp. [0] https://gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm https://gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm
  - newbamboo 5y ago
    The internet is a tool that I’ve again become tool of, it seems. The fuller context of the quote I was searching for I think still applies as much to IDEs as emacs. Lisp is arguably a more solid and earthly foundation. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.”
Waterluvian 5y ago
“Power drills have batteries or cords and motors that wear down and they’re more expensive and complex and can break more easily and it’s just smarter to bring hand crank tools to the worksite.” - Nobody
- zucker42 5y ago
  People still use shovels even though excavators exist.
  - citizenkeen 5y ago
    Those are not comparable. If there was a backpack mounted shovel that powered my digging I'd never use a shovel again.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    People still drink water even though Brawndo exists
- bluedino 5y ago
  Portable electric power tools are such a game changer when working on cars. I could never go back to the days of doing it by hand, it would be ten times worse for construction.
  - desine 5y ago
    I would never use power tools on my motorcycle or car. On threading, nuts/bolts/screws should always be torqued gently into spec. On unthreading, I prefer to feel if there's significant resistance, warranting a cleaning/deoxidization of the part. Predrilling a screw hole in some hard wood? Yeah I don't need to feel anything except the power of lithium cells dumping electricity into torque.
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  Power drills are simple tools, they are the 'vi' equivalent of the 'ed' manual drill. The physical equivalent of an IDE would be a laser-guided auto-centering/levelling drill with automatic drill bit changer/sharpener, depth guide, dust evacuation and material sensor with automatic lookup for which hole size and depth to use for the given task. It would weigh 15 kg, need an external power pack and be unusable in tight corners. For some tasks it would be a great time saver, for others it would just be in the way. Some workers would love it, others would fight it. Some would be more productive using it, others would be far more productive if only that damn megadrill did not insist on using that oversized drill bit while they knew the construction would be much stronger by using a slightly smaller bit, necessitating them to override the megadrill tool selector for each and every hole they drilled.
IncRnd 5y ago
It's not being lazy. There is no need for me to use an Integrated Development Environment. Many of the most highly productive people use Separated Development Environments. The integration is most times not necessary. I have never had an IDE provide a feature that I needed and couldn't quickly create or obtain. People let you install your tools in your monolithic IDE package. Why are you so insistent on degrading people who are experts in their fields?
- z5h 5y ago
  In 20 years of working as an engineer and also interviewing, I’ve seen maybe 3 people that could be as productive without an IDE. They certainly exist, but I believe they are rare exceptions.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    I understand. So, the differences must be the backgrounds or amount of time the people have spent as programmers. I'm, of course, not talking about certain platforms that almost certainly expect or require the use of a specific IDE build tool.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  It kind of depends on how we are defining IDE. Every developer I know who doesn't use an IDE uses either VS Code, vim or emacs with a bunch of plugins which approximate IDE functionality (but are much more customizable and configurable which I suspect is what they like about it). At the end of the day every IDE is just a text editor with plugins too. It really comes down to whether you want something that just works (and probably forces you to do some things THEIR way on some margin) or you want to tweak your dev environment to be just right for your workflow.
  - bccdee 5y ago
    Yeah, that's true. For me, it'd be somewhat irritating to work without LSP features like "jump to definition," "hover to view doc string," or even tab completion. Arguably, these are IDE features. But when it comes to higher-level features like build tooling or even grepping, I'd much rather work from a command line. Something like tab completion can't exist outside the editor, but as soon as features can exist as separate tools, bundling them together begins to feel like a limitation. Having separate tools means you can discard the ones you don't need, which is part of what leads to fully-featured IDEs feeling so bloated to me.
the_third_wave 5y ago
> …but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy. This is the vi vs emacs debate transposed to build tools and as such will never conclude. Some like their tools to be as "complete" as possible, others want them out of the way. You might be closer to the first camp, I'm close to the second, others are in between. All of these choices are fine, there is no canonical truth here and as such the "nonsense" label used above is just that, nonsensical.
alpaca128 5y ago
For me the choice is more a) tooling that does everything but distracts me all the time b) tooling with some limitations but versatile, consistent across languages and completely modular. I'm not rejecting IDEs because I didn't like one thing. I like nothing about IDEs except the refactoring feature; but even that doesn't make up for the painful UX. IDEs are like MS Word: they do everything I need but I hate every moment of it.
Mikeb85 5y ago
Dunno, I kind of like no IDE. If you use an IDE, it's basically editor + a bunch of command line tools being invoked from the IDE's interface. You can also just use an editor + those command line tools from a terminal. It's the same functionality with a slightly different workflow and IMO not worse. I disagree with the author's dislike of code completion tools but somewhat agree with the other points. In particular how some IDEs create their own project structure.
drunkpotato 5y ago
The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're doing to help them out, costing their colleagues time and frustration helping them when they won't help themselves. Some people from the first group find they prefer not using an IDE. It's rather the opposite of laziness, it's choosing the workflow they find most productive, even if it differs from your preferred workflow.
- irrational 5y ago
  That sounds more like a problem with git than a problem with the IDE. Why does git allow you to screw up your repository?
  - slim 5y ago
    Bacause git is powerful
    - moron4hire 5y ago
      Being able to do the wrong thing should not be confused with power. It's just a broken tool, that is broken so often, it needs this so-called "power" to clean up after it when it shits the bed.
      - Akronymus 5y ago
        The very power that allows you to screw up is the power thar makes the tool worth using in the first place.
  - aoms 5y ago
    Git simply gives you the power to do 'things', if that results in a state you didn't want.. well.. go figure
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
There’s only one place I can disagree. Some examples of Teaching/learning. The US Navy is teaches C without an IDE. This makes sense for them. If they had institutional knowledge going back to the 1970s, it all still pretty much applies and looks the same as it did 50 years ago, or another 50 years from now. Yes. You should use a good tooling if your goal is to make something.
chooseaname 5y ago
c) choosing a platform that over complicates things and requires tooling that most developers use but never quite understand. > you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing c
TeeMassive 5y ago
Me too I dislike this kind of absolute statements about IDEs. The author make a few good points about abusing some features; just like abusing any tool beyond their intended purposes. IMO the best is the compromise of making the code IDE agnostic. So yeah, I do use IDEs and other tools in conjunction to that the tools I used and the skills I know are not bound to a specific project.
adrian_b 5y ago
There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless. For editing or just navigating the source files, the smarter the editor is, the better. On the other hand I have never seen any IDE where the management of projects (e.g. adding/deleting/moving/renaming files and setting compilation/linking options) and the compilation/building/running functions are as simple and fast as how that can be done without using an IDE (if you know how to do it in the right way). Especially the Eclipse-based IDE's provided by many vendors of embedded products are the worst offenders. I have wasted too much time with helping puzzled coworkers to find where in the hierarchy of IDE menus one could find whatever was needed. Even when knowing where to find the commands, using the IDE menus was many orders of magnitude slower than what I could do outside the IDE to perform the same function upon the project.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  It also depends on the language. I don't think I'd consider working in a .NET project with an IDE, but it's overkill for Ruby or Javascript projects.
  - smw 5y ago
    Rubymine can, with one click, make an ER diagram of your ActiveRecord model -- from the code, not the db schema. That pays for itself right there, especially if you're learning someone else's code base. Try it for a day, you'll never go back.
    - bdcravens 5y ago
      I've used it before. I found it valuable, but there were a number of reasons I went back to a smart editor instead. I do use Jet Brain's DataGrip, so I'm a big fan of their tools overall.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless. I know VSCode is positioned this way in the market, probably to differentiate it from VS. And I switched to it from a much less “smart” editor (TextMate, which I still adore! No offense meant to TM creator/maintainers!). I’m having a hard time seeing this as a clear distinction, however. I mean, VSCode has a built in debugger/protocol, language server/protocol/intellisense, file system aware refactoring, code rewriting refactoring, integrated git client, inline blame and history navigation, GitHub integration, linter integration including automated fixes… I understand it’s a different tool than VS, but I honestly don’t have a clear understanding of what separates editor from IDE in this case.
abetusk 5y ago
IDE !== tooling Your sentiment about the right tools for the job is spot on, and one should strive to choose tools that make you more productive but IDEs are one tool of many. There's a host of other things to consider, like what is the testing environment like, library management, repository layout, etc. When you're working across a wide variety of languages, setups, environments, etc. choosing an IDE like Eclipse or Atom might not always be the right tool for the job. This also completely neglects the fact that vi/vim and Emacs, while mostly considered "text editors", can be enhanced to essentially be IDEs in their own right. I think the article's arguments are weak, but so is this counter-argument, sorry.
toiletaccount 5y ago
jesus christ. coding used to mean something. i guess we all should eat baby food because we arent being smart cool or clever by wasting time and energy chewing.
l0b0 5y ago
Definitely. There's no dichotomy though. I use some of the features of my IDE: editing obviously, interactive debugging and just general exploration via Ctrl-click are infinitely faster and more powerful than anything I've used on the command line. It's not great for everything though. So I keep swapping to the terminal for everything which I find more effective there: Git, running tests, creating projects, and the like. Basically, don't think a single toolset is always going to be superior to your other toolsets. Feel free to mix and match, and change over from one toolset to the other when it's convenient or just more efficient. But of course moderation isn't going to get the clicks.
tpoacher 5y ago
You seem to be mistaking lack of an IDE with lack of tooling ...
OJFord 5y ago
What? No, sorry, your comment is the nonsense. Not using an IDE doesn't mean 'no tooling', it just means 'different tooling we don't happen to call 'IDE''. I think it's so blurry now as to be a pointless debate anyway - is VS Code an 'IDE'? Or is it an editor with a load of plug-ins available that give it equivalent functionality to an IDE? Because the latter definitely applies to vim and emacs and sublime too, and if it's the first, then... A lot of people don't use an IDE!
drdebug 5y ago
It seems to really depend on the type of work that you are doing. If you write high level code using many external libraries in a language like Java, using an IDE can be a time saver. If you are write low level C code, I found that using an IDE does not seem to be that helpful. But that's just my 2c.

bbrree66 5y ago

Agreed. It's obvious this is written by some pseudo intellectual who wants to feel smart and different by saying they don't use an IDE. Benefits easily out weigh any downsides.

newbamboo 5y ago

“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” Henry David Thoreau One day the IDE will do most of the coding. Users will just click “ok” and spend most of their time asking IT to reboot and reinstall things until it all just works(tm).

MonkeyClub 5y ago
This isn't an actual verbatim Thoreau quote, it's rather a mishmash of disparate sentences from Walden,[0] so perhaps the use of the quotes is mistaken. The sentences do carry a general spirit, however, which is very nice and pleasing, until you're reminded that Thoreau's rugged existence in nature was supported by his mum cooking him dinner. I would instead offer the following sentence from Walden as a better encapsulation: "The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten." Namely, our arts and crafts come to cater to the alleviation of the burden of our physicality, yet neglect the needs of our spirituality. I doubt that either the command line or an IDE can cater much to spirituality, although I've heard some argue that there's much food for the soul in Emacs and Lisp. [0] https://gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm https://gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm
- newbamboo 5y ago
  The internet is a tool that I’ve again become tool of, it seems. The fuller context of the quote I was searching for I think still applies as much to IDEs as emacs. Lisp is arguably a more solid and earthly foundation. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.”

Waterluvian 5y ago

“Power drills have batteries or cords and motors that wear down and they’re more expensive and complex and can break more easily and it’s just smarter to bring hand crank tools to the worksite.” - Nobody

zucker42 5y ago
People still use shovels even though excavators exist.
- citizenkeen 5y ago
  Those are not comparable. If there was a backpack mounted shovel that powered my digging I'd never use a shovel again.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  People still drink water even though Brawndo exists
bluedino 5y ago
Portable electric power tools are such a game changer when working on cars. I could never go back to the days of doing it by hand, it would be ten times worse for construction.
- desine 5y ago
  I would never use power tools on my motorcycle or car. On threading, nuts/bolts/screws should always be torqued gently into spec. On unthreading, I prefer to feel if there's significant resistance, warranting a cleaning/deoxidization of the part. Predrilling a screw hole in some hard wood? Yeah I don't need to feel anything except the power of lithium cells dumping electricity into torque.
the_third_wave 5y ago
Power drills are simple tools, they are the 'vi' equivalent of the 'ed' manual drill. The physical equivalent of an IDE would be a laser-guided auto-centering/levelling drill with automatic drill bit changer/sharpener, depth guide, dust evacuation and material sensor with automatic lookup for which hole size and depth to use for the given task. It would weigh 15 kg, need an external power pack and be unusable in tight corners. For some tasks it would be a great time saver, for others it would just be in the way. Some workers would love it, others would fight it. Some would be more productive using it, others would be far more productive if only that damn megadrill did not insist on using that oversized drill bit while they knew the construction would be much stronger by using a slightly smaller bit, necessitating them to override the megadrill tool selector for each and every hole they drilled.

IncRnd 5y ago

It's not being lazy. There is no need for me to use an Integrated Development Environment. Many of the most highly productive people use Separated Development Environments. The integration is most times not necessary. I have never had an IDE provide a feature that I needed and couldn't quickly create or obtain. People let you install your tools in your monolithic IDE package. Why are you so insistent on degrading people who are experts in their fields?

z5h 5y ago
In 20 years of working as an engineer and also interviewing, I’ve seen maybe 3 people that could be as productive without an IDE. They certainly exist, but I believe they are rare exceptions.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  I understand. So, the differences must be the backgrounds or amount of time the people have spent as programmers. I'm, of course, not talking about certain platforms that almost certainly expect or require the use of a specific IDE build tool.
thinkharderdev 5y ago
It kind of depends on how we are defining IDE. Every developer I know who doesn't use an IDE uses either VS Code, vim or emacs with a bunch of plugins which approximate IDE functionality (but are much more customizable and configurable which I suspect is what they like about it). At the end of the day every IDE is just a text editor with plugins too. It really comes down to whether you want something that just works (and probably forces you to do some things THEIR way on some margin) or you want to tweak your dev environment to be just right for your workflow.
- bccdee 5y ago
  Yeah, that's true. For me, it'd be somewhat irritating to work without LSP features like "jump to definition," "hover to view doc string," or even tab completion. Arguably, these are IDE features. But when it comes to higher-level features like build tooling or even grepping, I'd much rather work from a command line. Something like tab completion can't exist outside the editor, but as soon as features can exist as separate tools, bundling them together begins to feel like a limitation. Having separate tools means you can discard the ones you don't need, which is part of what leads to fully-featured IDEs feeling so bloated to me.

the_third_wave 5y ago

> …but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy. This is the vi vs emacs debate transposed to build tools and as such will never conclude. Some like their tools to be as "complete" as possible, others want them out of the way. You might be closer to the first camp, I'm close to the second, others are in between. All of these choices are fine, there is no canonical truth here and as such the "nonsense" label used above is just that, nonsensical.

alpaca128 5y ago

For me the choice is more a) tooling that does everything but distracts me all the time b) tooling with some limitations but versatile, consistent across languages and completely modular. I'm not rejecting IDEs because I didn't like one thing. I like nothing about IDEs except the refactoring feature; but even that doesn't make up for the painful UX. IDEs are like MS Word: they do everything I need but I hate every moment of it.

Mikeb85 5y ago

Dunno, I kind of like no IDE. If you use an IDE, it's basically editor + a bunch of command line tools being invoked from the IDE's interface. You can also just use an editor + those command line tools from a terminal. It's the same functionality with a slightly different workflow and IMO not worse. I disagree with the author's dislike of code completion tools but somewhat agree with the other points. In particular how some IDEs create their own project structure.

drunkpotato 5y ago

The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're doing to help them out, costing their colleagues time and frustration helping them when they won't help themselves. Some people from the first group find they prefer not using an IDE. It's rather the opposite of laziness, it's choosing the workflow they find most productive, even if it differs from your preferred workflow.

irrational 5y ago
That sounds more like a problem with git than a problem with the IDE. Why does git allow you to screw up your repository?
- slim 5y ago
  Bacause git is powerful
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    Being able to do the wrong thing should not be confused with power. It's just a broken tool, that is broken so often, it needs this so-called "power" to clean up after it when it shits the bed.
    - Akronymus 5y ago
      The very power that allows you to screw up is the power thar makes the tool worth using in the first place.
- aoms 5y ago
  Git simply gives you the power to do 'things', if that results in a state you didn't want.. well.. go figure

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

There’s only one place I can disagree. Some examples of Teaching/learning. The US Navy is teaches C without an IDE. This makes sense for them. If they had institutional knowledge going back to the 1970s, it all still pretty much applies and looks the same as it did 50 years ago, or another 50 years from now. Yes. You should use a good tooling if your goal is to make something.

chooseaname 5y ago

c) choosing a platform that over complicates things and requires tooling that most developers use but never quite understand. > you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing c

TeeMassive 5y ago

Me too I dislike this kind of absolute statements about IDEs. The author make a few good points about abusing some features; just like abusing any tool beyond their intended purposes. IMO the best is the compromise of making the code IDE agnostic. So yeah, I do use IDEs and other tools in conjunction to that the tools I used and the skills I know are not bound to a specific project.

adrian_b 5y ago

There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless. For editing or just navigating the source files, the smarter the editor is, the better. On the other hand I have never seen any IDE where the management of projects (e.g. adding/deleting/moving/renaming files and setting compilation/linking options) and the compilation/building/running functions are as simple and fast as how that can be done without using an IDE (if you know how to do it in the right way). Especially the Eclipse-based IDE's provided by many vendors of embedded products are the worst offenders. I have wasted too much time with helping puzzled coworkers to find where in the hierarchy of IDE menus one could find whatever was needed. Even when knowing where to find the commands, using the IDE menus was many orders of magnitude slower than what I could do outside the IDE to perform the same function upon the project.

bdcravens 5y ago
It also depends on the language. I don't think I'd consider working in a .NET project with an IDE, but it's overkill for Ruby or Javascript projects.
- smw 5y ago
  Rubymine can, with one click, make an ER diagram of your ActiveRecord model -- from the code, not the db schema. That pays for itself right there, especially if you're learning someone else's code base. Try it for a day, you'll never go back.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    I've used it before. I found it valuable, but there were a number of reasons I went back to a smart editor instead. I do use Jet Brain's DataGrip, so I'm a big fan of their tools overall.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
> There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless. I know VSCode is positioned this way in the market, probably to differentiate it from VS. And I switched to it from a much less “smart” editor (TextMate, which I still adore! No offense meant to TM creator/maintainers!). I’m having a hard time seeing this as a clear distinction, however. I mean, VSCode has a built in debugger/protocol, language server/protocol/intellisense, file system aware refactoring, code rewriting refactoring, integrated git client, inline blame and history navigation, GitHub integration, linter integration including automated fixes… I understand it’s a different tool than VS, but I honestly don’t have a clear understanding of what separates editor from IDE in this case.

abetusk 5y ago

IDE !== tooling Your sentiment about the right tools for the job is spot on, and one should strive to choose tools that make you more productive but IDEs are one tool of many. There's a host of other things to consider, like what is the testing environment like, library management, repository layout, etc. When you're working across a wide variety of languages, setups, environments, etc. choosing an IDE like Eclipse or Atom might not always be the right tool for the job. This also completely neglects the fact that vi/vim and Emacs, while mostly considered "text editors", can be enhanced to essentially be IDEs in their own right. I think the article's arguments are weak, but so is this counter-argument, sorry.

toiletaccount 5y ago

jesus christ. coding used to mean something. i guess we all should eat baby food because we arent being smart cool or clever by wasting time and energy chewing.

l0b0 5y ago

Definitely. There's no dichotomy though. I use some of the features of my IDE: editing obviously, interactive debugging and just general exploration via Ctrl-click are infinitely faster and more powerful than anything I've used on the command line. It's not great for everything though. So I keep swapping to the terminal for everything which I find more effective there: Git, running tests, creating projects, and the like. Basically, don't think a single toolset is always going to be superior to your other toolsets. Feel free to mix and match, and change over from one toolset to the other when it's convenient or just more efficient. But of course moderation isn't going to get the clicks.

tpoacher 5y ago

You seem to be mistaking lack of an IDE with lack of tooling ...

OJFord 5y ago

What? No, sorry, your comment is the nonsense. Not using an IDE doesn't mean 'no tooling', it just means 'different tooling we don't happen to call 'IDE''. I think it's so blurry now as to be a pointless debate anyway - is VS Code an 'IDE'? Or is it an editor with a load of plug-ins available that give it equivalent functionality to an IDE? Because the latter definitely applies to vim and emacs and sublime too, and if it's the first, then... A lot of people don't use an IDE!

drdebug 5y ago

It seems to really depend on the type of work that you are doing. If you write high level code using many external libraries in a language like Java, using an IDE can be a time saver. If you are write low level C code, I found that using an IDE does not seem to be that helpful. But that's just my 2c.