I do Java in my day job and I agree, I couldn't write much Java code without an IDE, mainly because Java is a horrible language to cut code in and you do need t

I do Java in my day job and I agree, I couldn't write much Java code without an IDE, mainly because Java is a horrible language to cut code in and you do need to write a lot of boilerplate for many Java EE patterns. The IDE removes that problem somewhat. It's not that Java coders "can't write a line of code without an IDE", it's Java coders don't have the patience to write pure Java in a text editor. You're also forgetting that a lot of enterprise applications consist of many many .java source files for each class. Trying to deal with all of that manually becomes a real headache