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The section on Lock In effects makes little sense to me - if you look at popular .NET IDEs for instance, they mostly produce .sln and .csproj files - which is t

The section on Lock In effects makes little sense to me - if you look at popular .NET IDEs for instance, they mostly produce .sln and .csproj files - which is the defacto .NET standard, and works with the standard command line tooling. They're portable between IDEs, and you still produce .cs files with raw source code that you can open in any text editor. It's similar with PHP via something like PHPStorm, Python via something like PyCharm - there's no real lock-in beyond personal habits in IDEs I've used. More generally, in this space... using a text editor (with or without plugins) and using an IDE are both valid approaches. I do not believe either are fundamentally better than the other. Try both approaches and choose for yourself - it's all about finding what suits you as an individual and makes you more productive. You may even find that your choice differs depending on what software stack or language you're working with - mine does. "Hot takes" aiming to belittle or degrade people that choose the opposite to you are unhelpful at best and discourage people from trying both options for themselves. No one is a worse developer because they like working with a simple UI with minimal distractions and separate tools for separate tasks, and no one is a worse developer because they like more integrated tooling with code suggestions, refactoring tools, integrated debuggers, etc.

dkarl 3y ago
I don't want to defend the author's point, but I do believe he saw this happen, because I've seen it myself. People used their IDE for something like code generation, didn't know how to do it without the IDE (even positively said it couldn't be done outside their IDE) and then when a database column gets added and somebody with a different IDE tries to tackle the problem, they can't. "I can tell you how to do it with Eclipse." "I... haven't used Eclipse since 2007." "Well, after you install Eclipse, here are the directions for setting up the plugin and regenerating the database code." To the author's statement that it affects adoption of CI/CD, I've seen that, too, where teams didn't know how to run their Junit unit tests outside of an IDE and nobody felt capable of figuring it out. They were wrong, it didn't take too long to figure out, but they honestly believed that running Junit tests was a feature of their IDE, and were not aware that it could be run separately. These aren't persuasive arguments about using IDEs, because any sensible person can avoid them. I don't want to defend the author's point; I just want to say that I believe him when he says he's seen these things.
- minimaul 3y ago
  Ah, I was thinking more about lock in as more of a hard technical lock in (where he talks about setting up new build systems, CI, etc) rather than a soft lock in created via a lack of education & understanding, but I can see how that can happen if people just use tools without understanding what they do. That's a fair point!

dkarl 3y ago

I don't want to defend the author's point, but I do believe he saw this happen, because I've seen it myself. People used their IDE for something like code generation, didn't know how to do it without the IDE (even positively said it couldn't be done outside their IDE) and then when a database column gets added and somebody with a different IDE tries to tackle the problem, they can't. "I can tell you how to do it with Eclipse." "I... haven't used Eclipse since 2007." "Well, after you install Eclipse, here are the directions for setting up the plugin and regenerating the database code." To the author's statement that it affects adoption of CI/CD, I've seen that, too, where teams didn't know how to run their Junit unit tests outside of an IDE and nobody felt capable of figuring it out. They were wrong, it didn't take too long to figure out, but they honestly believed that running Junit tests was a feature of their IDE, and were not aware that it could be run separately. These aren't persuasive arguments about using IDEs, because any sensible person can avoid them. I don't want to defend the author's point; I just want to say that I believe him when he says he's seen these things.

minimaul 3y ago
Ah, I was thinking more about lock in as more of a hard technical lock in (where he talks about setting up new build systems, CI, etc) rather than a soft lock in created via a lack of education & understanding, but I can see how that can happen if people just use tools without understanding what they do. That's a fair point!