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Nice writeup! I'll go with the distinguishing characteristic of an IDE being that it understands the content as a specific language (or strives to) rather than
by frou_dh 14y ago
Nice writeup! I'll go with the distinguishing characteristic of an IDE being that it understands the content as a specific language (or strives to) rather than "some kind of scoped/indented code with keywords". Whether this is particularly compelling depends on how deft the implementation of a pairing is. Visual Studio fits C# like a glove, but with C++ there are sharp and wonky bits sticking out everywhere. I suppose another major characteristic is GUI abstraction of the build process.
- mhd 14y agoWell, GUI handling of the build (and jumping to errors) maybe, although this is rather common (and easy) in most programmer's editors, too. Abstraction is more a matter of taste. True, Visual Studio and XCode tend to hide away any kind of Makefiles, but mostly because native GUI apps don't have that many build stages and options, so the built in method is sufficient for 90+% of the cases. For servers and similar projects, you often have to include your own tasks, and thus the innards are exposed. Especially in Java IDEs it's rather common to edit the Maven files - although part of that is because putting a nice GUI around that monster isn't exactly easy. What we also didn't talk about is version control, but as this is completely orthogonal to the language itself, both IDEs and extensible editors handle this equally well.