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> The only serious IDE is Windows-specific, starts at $600 for the typical company (with advanced editions costing more than a small car)... and THEN you need t

> The only serious IDE is Windows-specific, starts at $600 for the typical company (with advanced editions costing more than a small car)... and THEN you need to pay $200 more for a JetBrains add-on called ReSharper This is completely ludicrous to me. Is it really that much better than just using emacs, vim, sublime text etc? I've written thousands upon thousands of lines of code with just a text editor (for which I've paid either nothing or very little) and my code runs just as well. It's just text at the end of the day, after all, and most of these editors can give you syntax highlighting, tab completion, linting, etc. For complex build procedures, there's make or any number of other free options. What exactly does one gain from these IDEs that can justify these kinds of price tags?

alkonaut 11y ago
1) It's that much better yes. I'm not going to start an endless discussion on text editors vs IDE's, but for an ecosystem designed from the ground up to handle hundreds of related projects with hundreds of contributors with different roles, and huge class libraries with static types, it's a massive productivity boost to have everything integrated (source control, testing, profiler, ...). For languages that aren't in this category (such as C or JavaScript) the story is completely different. 2) The community edition is free.
dtech 11y ago
You're comparing an editor to an Integrated Development Environment. It's really apples and oranges. The pure editor part of VS (and most IDE's) is probably worse than emacs/vim. However, you do not get refactoring, profiling, source-control, code-sensitive completion and all that other jazz that IDE's provide, all in one package and in more-or-less the same interface. Sure, there's probably plugins for vim/emacs that do all of these, but do they all work together well and how much time/expertise do you need to set them up. Now that doesn't necessarily make an IDE better, I fully expect some people do code faster/better in vim than in VS, but it certainly provides a lot of added value/features.
ZenoArrow 11y ago
If all you did was write code then, you're right, text editors are just as capable as IDEs. However, a decent IDE often has options that make building and debugging easier to manage. For example, one of the 'killer features' of VS is IntelliTrace debugging (a form of historical debugging). Does your text editor offer something similar? https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Historical-Debugging-with-IntelliTrace-in-Visual-Studio-2015 https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Histor...

alkonaut 11y ago

1) It's that much better yes. I'm not going to start an endless discussion on text editors vs IDE's, but for an ecosystem designed from the ground up to handle hundreds of related projects with hundreds of contributors with different roles, and huge class libraries with static types, it's a massive productivity boost to have everything integrated (source control, testing, profiler, ...). For languages that aren't in this category (such as C or JavaScript) the story is completely different. 2) The community edition is free.

dtech 11y ago

You're comparing an editor to an Integrated Development Environment. It's really apples and oranges. The pure editor part of VS (and most IDE's) is probably worse than emacs/vim. However, you do not get refactoring, profiling, source-control, code-sensitive completion and all that other jazz that IDE's provide, all in one package and in more-or-less the same interface. Sure, there's probably plugins for vim/emacs that do all of these, but do they all work together well and how much time/expertise do you need to set them up. Now that doesn't necessarily make an IDE better, I fully expect some people do code faster/better in vim than in VS, but it certainly provides a lot of added value/features.

ZenoArrow 11y ago

If all you did was write code then, you're right, text editors are just as capable as IDEs. However, a decent IDE often has options that make building and debugging easier to manage. For example, one of the 'killer features' of VS is IntelliTrace debugging (a form of historical debugging). Does your text editor offer something similar? https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Historical-Debugging-with-IntelliTrace-in-Visual-Studio-2015 https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Histor...