One of the things that worries me about IDE's these days is how its making learning syntax obsolete and promotes an attitude to avoid reading documentation. You

One of the things that worries me about IDE's these days is how its making learning syntax obsolete and promotes an attitude to avoid reading documentation. You still need to have some idea of the syntax though, but you don't have to know every little syntax detail of a language. This is largely true with Eclipse + Java combination. I've recently had problems during interviews. The interviewer asks questions related to Java syntax, now though I spend a good deal of time coding in Java- My mind is totally broken to think outside the IDE. The interviewer thinks I might simply be lying about the Java experience I claim to have. The same is not true for C and Perl, where I use simple editors. I can think problems out on the paper, or even build a abstract version of a whole complex app with just pen and paper. The best kind of IDE's is what I've seen in the embedded domain. Which assist you during work, you still have to read and internalize the documentation well. But the IDE will suggest you improvements, let you probe ports, registers and let you put break points to see if things are actually going around as you think they should. Above all you still have to learn the best practices the hard way, the IDE simply assists you to do that along the way.