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Neither choice matters much. Smart, flexible people tend to get the job done one way or another. If a bottleneck becomes apparent they work around it: revise,
by mdakin 19y ago
Neither choice matters much. Smart, flexible people tend to get the job done one way or another. If a bottleneck becomes apparent they work around it: revise, redesign, change languages, tools, editors as necessary.
Historically a lot of useless dogma and arguments have surrounded the choice of editor. There is a desire to avoid that sort of low-quality discussion.
- nostrademons 19y agoDepends. Smart, flexible people can get the job done with any tool as long as that tool is "good enough". However, a bad tool will cripple even a good programmer. The Emacs/vi/IntelliJ/Eclipse/Netbeans/Kate/jEdit/TextPad debate is meaningless, because all the above choices are "good enough". However, a decent programmer's productivity will be severely hampered by Notepad. Similarly, the Rails/Django/Pylons debate is pointless, but choosing JSF can easily kill your project.
- mdakin 19y agoI understand what you're saying but I think you're missing my point. If any tool was empirically "not good enough" or "crippling" it would be abandoned and the show would go on. The focus is on the end result. The SFP gets there one way or another.
- nostrademons 19y agoHeh, you'd be surprised at how many businesses cling to crippling tools because management has made their decision and refuses to abandon it. Moreso with languages than with editors, though I know of companies that standardize on a toolset (often one that's not top-notch, though I don't know of any that would mandate something as ridiculous as Notepad) and refuse to let you use anything other than that. Sometimes customers mandate certain technology choices too - I know of one government-sponsored project where they had to use Java/EJB even though virtually every engineer in the company thought it was a terrible choice.
- mdakin 19y agoMany of the projects I've worked on have succeeded in spite of lousy tools, insane deadlines and other various hardships. Those experiences were the genesis of my personal philosophy that good people get the job done one way or another. Luckily the people I've worked with have all been pretty smart!
- Goladus 19y agoThe Emacs/vi/IntelliJ/Eclipse/Netbeans/Kate/jEdit/TextPad debate is meaningless To the extent that it becomes a religious discussion about which one is the best, which happens all the time, I think you're right. However, the exchange of ideas that results can be meaningful. This is especially true of emacs, since there's so much room to use it creatively, but is applicable to all those other editors as well.
- mdakin 19y agoAgreed. Exchange of ideas is valuable, esp. w.r.t. emacs.