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It's a trade-off. An IDE will often provide more and better integration, but is usually focused on a small subset of programming languages and is less flexible.

It's a trade-off. An IDE will often provide more and better integration, but is usually focused on a small subset of programming languages and is less flexible. Most editors less integration, but are far more flexible. Take Sublime or Vim, you can customize every bit of the experience with scripts without too much effort. Also, I think some languages tend to need an IDE more than others. E.g. Java's relatively small feature set increases its verbosity. An IDE is almost required to avoid too much typing and memorizing. Haskell, on the other hand, is very expressive, making it less fit for smart autocompletion.

hello_moto 15y ago
Err, I doubt it takes less effort to customize Vim. OTOH, I like to use an IDE like NetBeans to navigate Ruby code (go to method implementation, go to class implementation, etc). I'd say it depends on what kind of project you're working on. If you're writing a small one-off script in Haskell, you probably don't need to use an IDE. The same goes for Java. Once you integrated 3rd-party libraries (like not just one, but say, 5 of them), you either have to memorize those libraries or be grateful that IDE can help you.