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I've been programming since well before we had IDEs... I love them. Proper modern IDEs provide a level of insight and tooling that the anti-IDE crowd just don't

I've been programming since well before we had IDEs... I love them. Proper modern IDEs provide a level of insight and tooling that the anti-IDE crowd just don't get. A couple of decades ago they were problematic. But today's unified toolchains and improvements made them far better. The one semi legitimate problem people have is performance. I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultimate). It flies. As professionals we need to spend on our tools and on our hardware to get the most out of both. The depth of insight that IntelliJ allows me at a glance when debugging, reviewing, refactoring, etc. is as a league that is so beyond what the CLI enables. I can't even begin to describe that. To be fair, this isn't universal. E.g. for kernel development, some embedded use cases, etc. the IDE might have less of a benefit. But for most day to day app development avoiding an IDE seems like a Luddite approach.

anonymoushn 4y ago
It seems like Java is in a pretty unique place in terms of the quality of the tools and the frequent need to use complex tools to get even a vague idea what's going on.
- invalidname 4y ago
  True. But Idea Ultimate works surprisingly well with JavaScript and very well with Typescript including react code, etc. It's so much easier than going through NPM noise. Just auto fix and in 95% of the cases it's just what I need. The JetBrains IDEs for other platforms have almost the same level of capabilities. I also worked a lot with xcode, its not nearly as good as AppCode but it's still an improvement over trying to build iOS from the command line... I did that a lot and that isn't a pleasant experience in the least.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - Macha 4y ago
    I should give it another go I guess. My last serious shake of Jetbrains for JS was on an angular 1 + gulp project a few years ago and it just couldn't do anything helpful.
- spullara 4y ago
  The only reason Java can even have the most powerful tools is because it is easy to see what is going on. Also, JetBrains does really well with all languages, generally more than any other IDE.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    I haven't encountered features in other languages that are pervasively used and work by leaving meaningless markers in the code which some other (typically undocumented, typically in another repository) code will eventually use to do codegen, AST rewriting, and so on. But other than this feature that's like way more difficult than macros in Lisp or C, which makes up like 20% of non-whitespace lines in Java code I have encountered in the last few years, I agree.
    - spullara 4y ago
      If you mean annotations that are easily traceable to the package that provides them, I suppose. That isn't how I program in Java these days but a lot of people do like that style. Honestly though I don't find it much different than Derive in Rust or extension methods in Swift.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Any large code base benefits from complex tools to get an idea of what's going on. Intellij / PyCharm does remarkably well with large Python code bases lacking type annotations, even if it has to take a guess here and there. But when you add type annotations, it's even better.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I think a professional software engineer can be expected/required to use proper tools. That includes using decent hardware. Fast computers allow you to wait less and waste less time. If you are any good, the accumulated savings in time are worth more than the hardware in a matter of days or weeks. So, don't cheap out on hardware. It's unprofessional. Within reason, you can actually get away with some budget hardware these days. And you can also use remote tools to make your hardware matter even less. But whatever you do, minimize the waste of time. And if you use e.g. rust, kotlin, or js based development tools, you likely have some non trivial build times that can benefit greatly from good CPUs, fast SSDs and enough memory. Those build times add up quickly. I'm old and wise enough to not get between developers and their tool choices no matter how odd they are. So, I tend to give a lot of freedom to my people; and also take that freedom occasionally because I love trying out different things and optimizing my workflow. I love learning from others on how to improve my own workflow. I have a simple rule: your code must be properly formatted, refactored, and free of warnings when you create a pull request. Boy scout rule basically. Anything less than that is sloppy work and I'll call it out and will make you fix it. Always be refactoring and cleaning up code. I don't care how you do it and whether you do it the smart way (using proper tools) or the dumb way (manually using notepad and staring at compiler output) as long as you do it and know how to do it and when to do it. If it looks like you are being clumsy/sloppy/negligent with your tools, I'll have to have a word with you and tell you how to improve. That may include some not so subtle hints about your tool choices.
ainiriand 4y ago
CLion for C++ is just brilliant.
pech0rin 4y ago
I dunno. I have used a lot of IDEs in my day but I always go back to emacs. I know its not for everyone but I can still have a running python, ruby, etc process and send bits of code to the process and interactively iterate on ideas smoothly. Also with the advent of language servers jump to definition, large refactoring of symbols, etc are pretty straightforward. The number 1 thing I hate about IDEs and will always hate about IDEs is that you open a "workspace" you cannot access all of your files at once. So often I am working with multiple git repos or various things scattered around my computer. In emacs I can simply open the file and have all the syntax highlighting, linting, etc just work. Instead of waiting for 10s for a whole new IDE workspace to open. And then not even have the ability to switch between them easily. Anyway, I don't think I am Luddite and I try to love modern IDEs and editors because everyone says how much more productive they are in them. I honestly have to think that editors are not whats holding back software development, and seems disingenuous to say shying away from them is somehow negative.
- zorr 4y ago
  The way I get around that is by opening multiple workspaces so I can alt-backtick between them. At least on my setup the ideavim copy buffers are shared between workspaces so I can easily yank from one and paste in the other. It requires a bit of memory though as IJ just works better if you give it a lot of memory. Not really a problem for me as my dev machines have at least 32 or 64G and besides IJ, firefox and a terminal I don't have much open.
- invalidname 4y ago
  A lot of my friends used emacs back at Sun. Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't. Yes a JetBrains IDEs will take longer to build the AST model in RAM but once you have it they do amazing things with it. E.g semantic search and replace, etc. The debugger capabilities are spectacular, they literally show the values of variables on the side of the line you stepped over. Another cool thing, inferred types just show next to the variable definition, parameter names appear in the method call, etc. These are small things that add up to a lot on the day to day. About projects. JetBrains do create project files but don't require a project structure in newer versions of their IDEs. The problem is that IDEs are very simple to pick up and people stop after that basic usage. They have depth that exceeds emacs in some respects.
parentheses 4y ago
I’ve yet to give VSCode a fair shake. I used IntelliJ a lot back in the day. IntelliJ is special. Last I had seen they employ their own language tooling for almost everything. Nowadays the CLI (TUI) experience is capable of a LOT. CLI editors have fantastic integration with languages via LSP. You end up with similarly fat but more modular tooling. They offer a modularity and options that give you more choice in building the experience you want. (Not just color schemes and layouts) You have to do more work to configure and learn your tools but it makes so much more personalization of workflow possible. My personal CLI tooling for git is really nice and hacking on it keeps teaching me more about git creating a flywheel of optimization and joy from using things I made. There is a cost to changing your personal workflow. As nice as some new and shiny things appear I don’t like flip flopping on my personal/professional setup. There comes a time when you start fresh. That will be when I try something different.
- soggybutter 4y ago
  This has been my experience. I'm by no means an IDE power user, but the only things I really missed while using vim were finding references and going to definition. Nowadays I can do that in vim for every language I care about without much configuration or effort, and there's a bunch of additional features available I still leave on the table
dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
Yea but you only need all that junk because you use Java. The rest of us just don't have that many files to refactor when we change things. I don't really hate ide's, I get the appeal, and sometimes it works out useful. It's just that most of the time it comes back to enterprisey software being the source of your problems, not the lack of features in your editor.
- emsy 4y ago
  Not everyone works on small codebases. Encouraging refactoring is a good thing.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Good IDEs precede Java, e.g. Borland products for Turbo Pascal and C++, Common Lisp and Smalltalk environments. The anti-IDE crowd seems to like to pick on Java.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - Supermancho 4y ago
    > The anti-IDE crowd seems to like to pick on Java. It's largely because Java is verbose. Because of that, the java ecosystem continues to produce frameworks and libraries that make it easier for programmers to convolute their code behind functionally opaque interfaces, eg Spring, Lombok, etc. which also happen to provide "solutions" to reducing repetitive or traditionally verbose code. We have computers to automate processes, primarily. Not using computers to do rote inspection (like argument intellisense or class method discovery), is backward and it helps a great deal until you start using pre-processor annotations which are a series of programs that run before your program is run. 1 step forward, 1 step back. Ofc there are still people who use handmade nails and leaves for toilet paper and they insist it's better than Java. I'm not sure they are wrong.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Somehow it is still much better than most hispter frameworks with their interpreted languages and monkey patching galore, or this Google worshipped language thanks its author's pedigree.
tsujp 4y ago
What happens when you now want to work in say.. Crystal, or Shell, or Rust, or Zig, or any other language for which there is not an IDE (even those also by JetBrains) which is 1:1 feature compatible to IntelliJ? Not all JetBrains IDEs have the same features. Rider (for .NET) only recently got remote editing support which IntelliJ already had for instance. Now you're only as good as your tool (IntelliJ) and you cannot work with any other language or tool which isn't 1:1 feature complete. If you had an extensible text editor beit vim, neovim, Sublime Text, emacs, VS Code or others then you could add extensions or features per language and keep using your single core tool (said text editor) with a configuration per-language.
- invalidname 4y ago
  I can use text editors and other IDEs just fine. An IDE gives me more power and for 99% of my work I can live within it. I'm just slower. I used Visual Studio when working with C# which is fine. Not as great. Didn't get a chance to do either Zig or Rust in practice (both look great and I would want to go there). This argument is like arguing against shoes because of "what will you do when you're barefoot".
  - ungamedplayer 4y ago
    I think its more like "what will you do when you need need hiking boots and you've got snow shoes and no budget"
    - invalidname 4y ago
      If I have no budget then I'm probably not a professional. Would you expect a contractor to build your house with just a hammer just because he ran out of cash buying the materials? I accept that some people live in poorer countries. I work with a lot of them and spend a great deal of time abroad. Even they have more powerful machines than the median and they get great discounts for those machines. Maybe not a machine as powerful as this but somethings that can still make the IDE fly.
      - 4y ago
pjmlp 4y ago
Same here, heck even James Gosling, the author of XEmacs and many UNIX utilities, says he would rather use an IDE nowadays.
- lispm 4y ago
  James Gosling is the author of XEmacs?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    I got it wrong, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs XEmacs is the Lucid one, https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LucidEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LucidEmacs
- eikenberry 4y ago
  Makes sense as XEmacs was an attempt to make Emacs more IDE like.
a-dub 4y ago
the problem i have with ides is that you never know when some boss or it department will stand in the way of your favorite being available. from open source work at home to the most paranoid of high security environments, vim tends to be there pretty reliably.
- invalidname 4y ago
  This is like saying the problem with using my hands is that I never know when my next job will be a football (soccer) player. I get that it's a muscle you need to practice. But limiting yourself to fit a potential restriction makes no sense.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    i've made use of various windows based microsoft ides, intellij, eclipse, wind river tornado, the qt creator, various activestate ides, various notebook ides and others i probably cannot even remember. i've encountered these ides in various corporate environments in varying degrees of broken where fixes are essentially impossible. (assuming they're available in the first place) i like vim, and other simple open source tools as they work reliably and are reliably available.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    There's something to that argument, though. You probably shouldn't use an IDE when you're learning a language. You should at least understand what it's doing behind the scenes and why.
    - invalidname 4y ago
      I think that when you're learning you should take the easy route and the IDE reduces some of the frustration we get when dealing with simple errors.
      - jacobyoder 4y ago
        Good IDE will usually highlight style and basic issues as you're typing them, and you can get a better idea of what 'canonical' foo-lang is. I'm not a ruby expert, but using RubyMine I'm reminded of some things while I'm coding, and (some) errors (or just style issues) are spotted before I run.
tpoacher 4y ago
I realise I'm probably alone in this, but this "depth of insight" is exactly one of the curses of IDEs for me. When you write on a terminal, you are encouraged to make good choices so that your code is clean, with a well-thought-out structure and conventions that allow it to be read and processed by a number of tools as painlessly as possible. When you're on the IDE, your code structure invariably reflects whatever workflow template has been defined for that particular IDE, and good conventions matter less because you can always use live links and stuff to inspect stuff via the IDE. Of course, you could argue that there's nothing stopping you from following those good practices on your IDE too, or making the extra effort to configure it with good structure and conventions. But in practice, it's a bit like making the extra mental effort to choose salad when there's steamy melty pizza right in front of you every single time. The temptation to take shortcuts and not think your code out properly and just rely on the IDE to dump its defaults is just too great. In the end, when you compare (professional) well-thought out code written in a terminal vs templated code written in an IDE, I feel that the difference in quality is often palpable. Also, I reject the idea that "tooling" is a concept unique to IDEs (or, in any case, that IDEs should necessarily imply superior "tooling"). Yes they offer the convenience of a suitethat is (hopefully) interoperable by design, but for me arguing that this makes them better tools is a bit like saying the Apple Store has better software than "the internet" and you should therefore only stick to Apple Store stuff.
- rvdginste 4y ago
  I think it's a bit naive to think that a given developer will produce better code when using an editor instead of an IDE. I believe that a certain developer will produce the same quality code whether he uses an editor or an IDE. If you use default templates and don't really care about the structure of your code when using an IDE, you won't suddenly start to care when using an editor. If you don't care about all kinds of shortcuts and specific functionality in your editor, you won't care about learning the shortcuts (and even functionality) in your IDE. Some people seem to think they will become better developers by learning to do their development with an editor, but I do not believe that is true. Maybe except for one thing: if you do use an editor and don't use something like LSP in your editor, you will be forced to memorise the standard libraries of your programming language; you need to memorise those to stay productive with an editor. And in general, I do believe that the pure text editing part is often more advanced in a good editor than in an IDE. But, a good IDE is an amazing tool when you have the hardware to run it. Especially with typed languages, an IDE makes it a lot easier to refactor code and change the design of your code. This really lowers the threshold to change the design of your code when requirements change. Since the changes are simple and fast, developers are more confident to do those changes and will consider those changes in more cases. And aside from that, IDEs also often include an analysis part and warn you about fishy things in your code. I have been an Emacs user for a very long time. I used it for C long time ago, and recently used (limited) it with an LSP server for C# (using the Doom Emacs distribution). And that is working nicely: magit is great, integration with LSP servers is great... you can get a lot of the stuff that is typical for IDEs. But when you do activate all those integrations, you will notice that it is also heavier to run and less responsive. So, in the end, when the hardware can run it, my preference is still the full-blown Rider IDE for C#. The IDE is much more complete out-of-the-box.
eikenberry 4y ago
IMO this has 2 issues. #1 If you need an IDE to handle simple things like you list I think the language's development model is designed with IDEs in mind (eg. Java). Better language support and tooling makes all these things trivial without an IDE. #2 There are no good Free Software IDEs and I will not make ethical compromises with my maker tooling.
- invalidname 4y ago
  Java didn't have a decent IDE for the first 10 years of its existence and I hated IntelliJ/NetBeans etc. when I first used them. The tools improved. They work great for all the languages I use. I'm not smart enough to keep an entire code base of every project I ever worked on in my head. Maybe you're a genius of a different level, even then... Wouldn't it make sense to clear the area of your brain that needs to remember every parameter name to a method call so the IDE will show that to you. IntelliJ community is free and open source. NetBeans too and it's decent. So is Eclipse. VSCode isn't exactly an IDE so I won't go into that.
  - eikenberry 4y ago
    You don't need an IDE to get, eg. function parameters, all normal programming oriented text editors do this now. IMO all of the 'editor' focused parts of IDEs are done great by the programming oriented text editors. It is the non-editor parts where IDEs differentiate themselves. Integrating testing, debugging, project management, refactoring, etc. Some of these things IDEs do pretty well and would be nice but they are not worth the tradeoffs you give up IMO. I prefer the looser coupling and composition you get with CLI oriented tools and value those aspects over the limited things that IDEs would offer. And none of this covers the fact that none of the good IDEs are Free Software. Which automatically removes them from consideration.
    - invalidname 4y ago
      Editors get this wrong when there are multiple complex and overriden functions/methods. Furthermore, they can't display things in the same way an IDE displays them. I suggest checking out a modern (admittedly non-free but open source) IDE. JetBrains displays argument names in an ineditable area next to the argument values. When debugging it shows the values that changed in each line in an area next to the line of code. It's amazing.
analog31 4y ago
What finally pushed me to use an IDE was the code inspection tools running in the background, and lighting up my likely bugs and style mistakes. So it's actually reacting to my code and doing something, rather than just flooding me with information. For now, Spyder (for Python) is just right. VSCode is too much, and I haven't figured out how to turn off the features that I don't care about.
Narishma 4y ago
> I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultimate). It flies. As professionals we need to spend on our tools and on our hardware to get the most out of both. The problem with that is you'll more than likely create applications that work fine on your fancy high-end systems but end up unusably slow on normal people's hardware.
- invalidname 4y ago
  That's why we have software testers. Most of the stuff I build nowadays is server backend stuff and mobile. For server backend this runs on strong machines. No problem. For mobile I use a device. For desktop stuff we have a minimum machine which we test. Also IDE's have profilers integrated where you can see if you take up too much RAM or CPU. There's no need to suffer slow performance to create apps that run in constrained resources. You can have more than one computer too. Even as a one person shop.
bitwize 4y ago
If you need an IDE to manage the complexity in large, complex software projects, then you need an IDE for the kernel -- one of the largest, most complex single software projects around. IDEs are written for this purpose -- modern CodeWarrior, for one. The fact that many kernel devs including Linus himself get along fine without one suggests that IDEs are not the universal good you seem to think they are. In particular, they are great if you follow the happy path anticipated by the IDE developers, but when things get weird, the IDE won't help you. So I tend to see a lot of IDE users alt-tabbing between their IDE, terminals, Postman, DBVisualizer, and what else have you which plays havoc with my brain and would only slow me down if that were my workflow. There's a perspective dependency to whatever the best tool for the job is. Some people can't live without a bell- and whistle-laden IDE; I can't live without a code editing tool that I can shape to my needs while I'm using it Which is why I won't be giving up Emacs any time soon.
- invalidname 4y ago
  I accept that I'm not nearly as smart as Linus. Also most Kernel developers know their own relatively narrow module not the entire project. Again, I programmed without an IDE (in Java too) and manage that completely fine. Just like I can walk barefoot without shoes. Same thing. It's a power tool that provides amazing capabilities. I go out of the IDE a lot too. I prefer using the native terminal rather than the one builtin the IDE (although some use that and that's fine) we each have our habits. CTO of my current company is a VIM nut. Uses it a lot. And an IDE. He uses each in the context he sees fit to his needs. I used to see a lot of people at my later days in Oracle (after the Sun acquisition) switching between Emacs and an IDE back and forth. Sometimes even on the same project. Each tool has its own power. It isn't a zero sum game between the two. I use external editors too for the right things.
- crummy 4y ago
  > I tend to see a lot of IDE users alt-tabbing between their IDE, terminals, Postman, DBVisualizer For what it's worth, IntelliJ use an IDE with an inbuilt terminal, HTTP client, and DB GUI.
alexvoda 4y ago
I would say that for embedded, your logic analyzer and you oscilloscope are actually part of the IDE. Embedded devs have the fanciest of IDEs.

anonymoushn 4y ago

It seems like Java is in a pretty unique place in terms of the quality of the tools and the frequent need to use complex tools to get even a vague idea what's going on.

invalidname 4y ago
True. But Idea Ultimate works surprisingly well with JavaScript and very well with Typescript including react code, etc. It's so much easier than going through NPM noise. Just auto fix and in 95% of the cases it's just what I need. The JetBrains IDEs for other platforms have almost the same level of capabilities. I also worked a lot with xcode, its not nearly as good as AppCode but it's still an improvement over trying to build iOS from the command line... I did that a lot and that isn't a pleasant experience in the least.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Macha 4y ago
  I should give it another go I guess. My last serious shake of Jetbrains for JS was on an angular 1 + gulp project a few years ago and it just couldn't do anything helpful.
spullara 4y ago
The only reason Java can even have the most powerful tools is because it is easy to see what is going on. Also, JetBrains does really well with all languages, generally more than any other IDE.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  I haven't encountered features in other languages that are pervasively used and work by leaving meaningless markers in the code which some other (typically undocumented, typically in another repository) code will eventually use to do codegen, AST rewriting, and so on. But other than this feature that's like way more difficult than macros in Lisp or C, which makes up like 20% of non-whitespace lines in Java code I have encountered in the last few years, I agree.
  - spullara 4y ago
    If you mean annotations that are easily traceable to the package that provides them, I suppose. That isn't how I program in Java these days but a lot of people do like that style. Honestly though I don't find it much different than Derive in Rust or extension methods in Swift.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Any large code base benefits from complex tools to get an idea of what's going on. Intellij / PyCharm does remarkably well with large Python code bases lacking type annotations, even if it has to take a guess here and there. But when you add type annotations, it's even better.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I think a professional software engineer can be expected/required to use proper tools. That includes using decent hardware. Fast computers allow you to wait less and waste less time. If you are any good, the accumulated savings in time are worth more than the hardware in a matter of days or weeks. So, don't cheap out on hardware. It's unprofessional. Within reason, you can actually get away with some budget hardware these days. And you can also use remote tools to make your hardware matter even less. But whatever you do, minimize the waste of time. And if you use e.g. rust, kotlin, or js based development tools, you likely have some non trivial build times that can benefit greatly from good CPUs, fast SSDs and enough memory. Those build times add up quickly. I'm old and wise enough to not get between developers and their tool choices no matter how odd they are. So, I tend to give a lot of freedom to my people; and also take that freedom occasionally because I love trying out different things and optimizing my workflow. I love learning from others on how to improve my own workflow. I have a simple rule: your code must be properly formatted, refactored, and free of warnings when you create a pull request. Boy scout rule basically. Anything less than that is sloppy work and I'll call it out and will make you fix it. Always be refactoring and cleaning up code. I don't care how you do it and whether you do it the smart way (using proper tools) or the dumb way (manually using notepad and staring at compiler output) as long as you do it and know how to do it and when to do it. If it looks like you are being clumsy/sloppy/negligent with your tools, I'll have to have a word with you and tell you how to improve. That may include some not so subtle hints about your tool choices.

ainiriand 4y ago

CLion for C++ is just brilliant.

pech0rin 4y ago

I dunno. I have used a lot of IDEs in my day but I always go back to emacs. I know its not for everyone but I can still have a running python, ruby, etc process and send bits of code to the process and interactively iterate on ideas smoothly. Also with the advent of language servers jump to definition, large refactoring of symbols, etc are pretty straightforward. The number 1 thing I hate about IDEs and will always hate about IDEs is that you open a "workspace" you cannot access all of your files at once. So often I am working with multiple git repos or various things scattered around my computer. In emacs I can simply open the file and have all the syntax highlighting, linting, etc just work. Instead of waiting for 10s for a whole new IDE workspace to open. And then not even have the ability to switch between them easily. Anyway, I don't think I am Luddite and I try to love modern IDEs and editors because everyone says how much more productive they are in them. I honestly have to think that editors are not whats holding back software development, and seems disingenuous to say shying away from them is somehow negative.

zorr 4y ago
The way I get around that is by opening multiple workspaces so I can alt-backtick between them. At least on my setup the ideavim copy buffers are shared between workspaces so I can easily yank from one and paste in the other. It requires a bit of memory though as IJ just works better if you give it a lot of memory. Not really a problem for me as my dev machines have at least 32 or 64G and besides IJ, firefox and a terminal I don't have much open.
invalidname 4y ago
A lot of my friends used emacs back at Sun. Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't. Yes a JetBrains IDEs will take longer to build the AST model in RAM but once you have it they do amazing things with it. E.g semantic search and replace, etc. The debugger capabilities are spectacular, they literally show the values of variables on the side of the line you stepped over. Another cool thing, inferred types just show next to the variable definition, parameter names appear in the method call, etc. These are small things that add up to a lot on the day to day. About projects. JetBrains do create project files but don't require a project structure in newer versions of their IDEs. The problem is that IDEs are very simple to pick up and people stop after that basic usage. They have depth that exceeds emacs in some respects.

parentheses 4y ago

I’ve yet to give VSCode a fair shake. I used IntelliJ a lot back in the day. IntelliJ is special. Last I had seen they employ their own language tooling for almost everything. Nowadays the CLI (TUI) experience is capable of a LOT. CLI editors have fantastic integration with languages via LSP. You end up with similarly fat but more modular tooling. They offer a modularity and options that give you more choice in building the experience you want. (Not just color schemes and layouts) You have to do more work to configure and learn your tools but it makes so much more personalization of workflow possible. My personal CLI tooling for git is really nice and hacking on it keeps teaching me more about git creating a flywheel of optimization and joy from using things I made. There is a cost to changing your personal workflow. As nice as some new and shiny things appear I don’t like flip flopping on my personal/professional setup. There comes a time when you start fresh. That will be when I try something different.

soggybutter 4y ago
This has been my experience. I'm by no means an IDE power user, but the only things I really missed while using vim were finding references and going to definition. Nowadays I can do that in vim for every language I care about without much configuration or effort, and there's a bunch of additional features available I still leave on the table

dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago

Yea but you only need all that junk because you use Java. The rest of us just don't have that many files to refactor when we change things. I don't really hate ide's, I get the appeal, and sometimes it works out useful. It's just that most of the time it comes back to enterprisey software being the source of your problems, not the lack of features in your editor.

emsy 4y ago
Not everyone works on small codebases. Encouraging refactoring is a good thing.
pjmlp 4y ago
Good IDEs precede Java, e.g. Borland products for Turbo Pascal and C++, Common Lisp and Smalltalk environments. The anti-IDE crowd seems to like to pick on Java.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > The anti-IDE crowd seems to like to pick on Java. It's largely because Java is verbose. Because of that, the java ecosystem continues to produce frameworks and libraries that make it easier for programmers to convolute their code behind functionally opaque interfaces, eg Spring, Lombok, etc. which also happen to provide "solutions" to reducing repetitive or traditionally verbose code. We have computers to automate processes, primarily. Not using computers to do rote inspection (like argument intellisense or class method discovery), is backward and it helps a great deal until you start using pre-processor annotations which are a series of programs that run before your program is run. 1 step forward, 1 step back. Ofc there are still people who use handmade nails and leaves for toilet paper and they insist it's better than Java. I'm not sure they are wrong.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Somehow it is still much better than most hispter frameworks with their interpreted languages and monkey patching galore, or this Google worshipped language thanks its author's pedigree.

tsujp 4y ago

What happens when you now want to work in say.. Crystal, or Shell, or Rust, or Zig, or any other language for which there is not an IDE (even those also by JetBrains) which is 1:1 feature compatible to IntelliJ? Not all JetBrains IDEs have the same features. Rider (for .NET) only recently got remote editing support which IntelliJ already had for instance. Now you're only as good as your tool (IntelliJ) and you cannot work with any other language or tool which isn't 1:1 feature complete. If you had an extensible text editor beit vim, neovim, Sublime Text, emacs, VS Code or others then you could add extensions or features per language and keep using your single core tool (said text editor) with a configuration per-language.

invalidname 4y ago
I can use text editors and other IDEs just fine. An IDE gives me more power and for 99% of my work I can live within it. I'm just slower. I used Visual Studio when working with C# which is fine. Not as great. Didn't get a chance to do either Zig or Rust in practice (both look great and I would want to go there). This argument is like arguing against shoes because of "what will you do when you're barefoot".
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  I think its more like "what will you do when you need need hiking boots and you've got snow shoes and no budget"
  - invalidname 4y ago
    If I have no budget then I'm probably not a professional. Would you expect a contractor to build your house with just a hammer just because he ran out of cash buying the materials? I accept that some people live in poorer countries. I work with a lot of them and spend a great deal of time abroad. Even they have more powerful machines than the median and they get great discounts for those machines. Maybe not a machine as powerful as this but somethings that can still make the IDE fly.
    - 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

Same here, heck even James Gosling, the author of XEmacs and many UNIX utilities, says he would rather use an IDE nowadays.

lispm 4y ago
James Gosling is the author of XEmacs?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  I got it wrong, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs XEmacs is the Lucid one, https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LucidEmacs https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LucidEmacs
eikenberry 4y ago
Makes sense as XEmacs was an attempt to make Emacs more IDE like.

a-dub 4y ago

the problem i have with ides is that you never know when some boss or it department will stand in the way of your favorite being available. from open source work at home to the most paranoid of high security environments, vim tends to be there pretty reliably.

invalidname 4y ago
This is like saying the problem with using my hands is that I never know when my next job will be a football (soccer) player. I get that it's a muscle you need to practice. But limiting yourself to fit a potential restriction makes no sense.
- a-dub 4y ago
  i've made use of various windows based microsoft ides, intellij, eclipse, wind river tornado, the qt creator, various activestate ides, various notebook ides and others i probably cannot even remember. i've encountered these ides in various corporate environments in varying degrees of broken where fixes are essentially impossible. (assuming they're available in the first place) i like vim, and other simple open source tools as they work reliably and are reliably available.
- bandrami 4y ago
  There's something to that argument, though. You probably shouldn't use an IDE when you're learning a language. You should at least understand what it's doing behind the scenes and why.
  - invalidname 4y ago
    I think that when you're learning you should take the easy route and the IDE reduces some of the frustration we get when dealing with simple errors.
    - jacobyoder 4y ago
      Good IDE will usually highlight style and basic issues as you're typing them, and you can get a better idea of what 'canonical' foo-lang is. I'm not a ruby expert, but using RubyMine I'm reminded of some things while I'm coding, and (some) errors (or just style issues) are spotted before I run.

tpoacher 4y ago

I realise I'm probably alone in this, but this "depth of insight" is exactly one of the curses of IDEs for me. When you write on a terminal, you are encouraged to make good choices so that your code is clean, with a well-thought-out structure and conventions that allow it to be read and processed by a number of tools as painlessly as possible. When you're on the IDE, your code structure invariably reflects whatever workflow template has been defined for that particular IDE, and good conventions matter less because you can always use live links and stuff to inspect stuff via the IDE. Of course, you could argue that there's nothing stopping you from following those good practices on your IDE too, or making the extra effort to configure it with good structure and conventions. But in practice, it's a bit like making the extra mental effort to choose salad when there's steamy melty pizza right in front of you every single time. The temptation to take shortcuts and not think your code out properly and just rely on the IDE to dump its defaults is just too great. In the end, when you compare (professional) well-thought out code written in a terminal vs templated code written in an IDE, I feel that the difference in quality is often palpable. Also, I reject the idea that "tooling" is a concept unique to IDEs (or, in any case, that IDEs should necessarily imply superior "tooling"). Yes they offer the convenience of a suitethat is (hopefully) interoperable by design, but for me arguing that this makes them better tools is a bit like saying the Apple Store has better software than "the internet" and you should therefore only stick to Apple Store stuff.

rvdginste 4y ago
I think it's a bit naive to think that a given developer will produce better code when using an editor instead of an IDE. I believe that a certain developer will produce the same quality code whether he uses an editor or an IDE. If you use default templates and don't really care about the structure of your code when using an IDE, you won't suddenly start to care when using an editor. If you don't care about all kinds of shortcuts and specific functionality in your editor, you won't care about learning the shortcuts (and even functionality) in your IDE. Some people seem to think they will become better developers by learning to do their development with an editor, but I do not believe that is true. Maybe except for one thing: if you do use an editor and don't use something like LSP in your editor, you will be forced to memorise the standard libraries of your programming language; you need to memorise those to stay productive with an editor. And in general, I do believe that the pure text editing part is often more advanced in a good editor than in an IDE. But, a good IDE is an amazing tool when you have the hardware to run it. Especially with typed languages, an IDE makes it a lot easier to refactor code and change the design of your code. This really lowers the threshold to change the design of your code when requirements change. Since the changes are simple and fast, developers are more confident to do those changes and will consider those changes in more cases. And aside from that, IDEs also often include an analysis part and warn you about fishy things in your code. I have been an Emacs user for a very long time. I used it for C long time ago, and recently used (limited) it with an LSP server for C# (using the Doom Emacs distribution). And that is working nicely: magit is great, integration with LSP servers is great... you can get a lot of the stuff that is typical for IDEs. But when you do activate all those integrations, you will notice that it is also heavier to run and less responsive. So, in the end, when the hardware can run it, my preference is still the full-blown Rider IDE for C#. The IDE is much more complete out-of-the-box.

eikenberry 4y ago

IMO this has 2 issues. #1 If you need an IDE to handle simple things like you list I think the language's development model is designed with IDEs in mind (eg. Java). Better language support and tooling makes all these things trivial without an IDE. #2 There are no good Free Software IDEs and I will not make ethical compromises with my maker tooling.

invalidname 4y ago
Java didn't have a decent IDE for the first 10 years of its existence and I hated IntelliJ/NetBeans etc. when I first used them. The tools improved. They work great for all the languages I use. I'm not smart enough to keep an entire code base of every project I ever worked on in my head. Maybe you're a genius of a different level, even then... Wouldn't it make sense to clear the area of your brain that needs to remember every parameter name to a method call so the IDE will show that to you. IntelliJ community is free and open source. NetBeans too and it's decent. So is Eclipse. VSCode isn't exactly an IDE so I won't go into that.
- eikenberry 4y ago
  You don't need an IDE to get, eg. function parameters, all normal programming oriented text editors do this now. IMO all of the 'editor' focused parts of IDEs are done great by the programming oriented text editors. It is the non-editor parts where IDEs differentiate themselves. Integrating testing, debugging, project management, refactoring, etc. Some of these things IDEs do pretty well and would be nice but they are not worth the tradeoffs you give up IMO. I prefer the looser coupling and composition you get with CLI oriented tools and value those aspects over the limited things that IDEs would offer. And none of this covers the fact that none of the good IDEs are Free Software. Which automatically removes them from consideration.
  - invalidname 4y ago
    Editors get this wrong when there are multiple complex and overriden functions/methods. Furthermore, they can't display things in the same way an IDE displays them. I suggest checking out a modern (admittedly non-free but open source) IDE. JetBrains displays argument names in an ineditable area next to the argument values. When debugging it shows the values that changed in each line in an area next to the line of code. It's amazing.

analog31 4y ago

What finally pushed me to use an IDE was the code inspection tools running in the background, and lighting up my likely bugs and style mistakes. So it's actually reacting to my code and doing something, rather than just flooding me with information. For now, Spyder (for Python) is just right. VSCode is too much, and I haven't figured out how to turn off the features that I don't care about.

Narishma 4y ago

> I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultimate). It flies. As professionals we need to spend on our tools and on our hardware to get the most out of both. The problem with that is you'll more than likely create applications that work fine on your fancy high-end systems but end up unusably slow on normal people's hardware.

invalidname 4y ago
That's why we have software testers. Most of the stuff I build nowadays is server backend stuff and mobile. For server backend this runs on strong machines. No problem. For mobile I use a device. For desktop stuff we have a minimum machine which we test. Also IDE's have profilers integrated where you can see if you take up too much RAM or CPU. There's no need to suffer slow performance to create apps that run in constrained resources. You can have more than one computer too. Even as a one person shop.

bitwize 4y ago

If you need an IDE to manage the complexity in large, complex software projects, then you need an IDE for the kernel -- one of the largest, most complex single software projects around. IDEs are written for this purpose -- modern CodeWarrior, for one. The fact that many kernel devs including Linus himself get along fine without one suggests that IDEs are not the universal good you seem to think they are. In particular, they are great if you follow the happy path anticipated by the IDE developers, but when things get weird, the IDE won't help you. So I tend to see a lot of IDE users alt-tabbing between their IDE, terminals, Postman, DBVisualizer, and what else have you which plays havoc with my brain and would only slow me down if that were my workflow. There's a perspective dependency to whatever the best tool for the job is. Some people can't live without a bell- and whistle-laden IDE; I can't live without a code editing tool that I can shape to my needs while I'm using it Which is why I won't be giving up Emacs any time soon.

invalidname 4y ago
I accept that I'm not nearly as smart as Linus. Also most Kernel developers know their own relatively narrow module not the entire project. Again, I programmed without an IDE (in Java too) and manage that completely fine. Just like I can walk barefoot without shoes. Same thing. It's a power tool that provides amazing capabilities. I go out of the IDE a lot too. I prefer using the native terminal rather than the one builtin the IDE (although some use that and that's fine) we each have our habits. CTO of my current company is a VIM nut. Uses it a lot. And an IDE. He uses each in the context he sees fit to his needs. I used to see a lot of people at my later days in Oracle (after the Sun acquisition) switching between Emacs and an IDE back and forth. Sometimes even on the same project. Each tool has its own power. It isn't a zero sum game between the two. I use external editors too for the right things.
crummy 4y ago
> I tend to see a lot of IDE users alt-tabbing between their IDE, terminals, Postman, DBVisualizer For what it's worth, IntelliJ use an IDE with an inbuilt terminal, HTTP client, and DB GUI.

alexvoda 4y ago

I would say that for embedded, your logic analyzer and you oscilloscope are actually part of the IDE. Embedded devs have the fanciest of IDEs.