

An IDE Is Not Enough. - jashkenas
http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=680

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groby_b
I'd rather see people try to improve our tools than not. And yes, the academic
argument against it is "we're hampered by our languages".

So we are. Nobody proposed _not_ working on new languages. But even if there
was an entirely new language that made for fantastic IDEs ( _cough_ Smalltalk
;), we have an insanely large existing code base in "legacy" languages.

Until those are ported to those new languages (and I have a few piles of
FORTRAN and COBOL code to say "that ain't gonna happen, ever"), _any_
improvement in our tooling is progress.

Yes, we'd all like a silver bullet that makes us 2x more productive. Until we
have that, I propose we tackle our problems on all fronts, not just a single
one.

(For the record, I'm extremely skeptical about those new IDEs and their
success. We'll see what happens. I'll still throw a bit of money at it, just
because I think _any_ kind of work on new tooling will result in new insights)

