Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this.
Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b.
Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most productive.
…but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy.
The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one.
Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're doing to help them out, costing their colleagues time and frustration helping them when they won't help themselves.
Some people from the first group find they prefer not using an IDE. It's rather the opposite of laziness, it's choosing the workflow they find most productive, even if it differs from your preferred workflow.
The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them.
Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter? Is there so much boilerplate or XML or whatever within the frameworks we're using that writing or changing code is impossible without automation? These are bad things.
An IDE can be a powerful abstraction, but when the underlying layer it's abstracting over becomes inaccessible, then all it's doing is adding more complexity by obscuring concrete details.
"An IDE can be a powerful abstraction, but when the underlying layer it's abstracting over becomes inaccessible, then all it's doing is adding more complexity by obscuring concrete details"
I can edit, compile and install my kernel and all its drivers in a few command lines from shell, why more and more projects, most way simpler than a kernel, ask me to install for example VSC just to build them? Give me a Makefile and possibly enough instructions to integrate its options into the favorite IDE, but making the IDE a requirement, especially for small projects or those one simply wants to build and install, adds only more complexity.
> Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite?
In the java ecosystem at least, the answer is no. But in highly CI-based situations, the answer is still no, but you DO need the CI system to be up, and the only way to run a test at all is to just commit something and see the CI system run it, e.g. because the tests require a database engine that isn't installed on your development machine.
I'm not saying that's a good idea, just saying that I have seen that in real (as in, for pay and for real eyeballs) dev teams. I've never observed 'I only know how to run my tests inside the IDE'. IDEs (again, this is mostly speaking from the perspective of the java ecosystem) use build tools as project definitions, and those build tests all know how to run the test suite from the command line. `mvn test` is all you need to type.
> Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter?
No, it's `mvn install` or `mvn build` or whatever take on 'build' you are looking for specifically.
If you ditch your IDE, __nothing__ whatsoever would change: Your build is _still_ based on a build tool. (it better be, in the sense that trying to run the build by hand or by patching a bunch of shell scripts together is almost 100% correlated with very low quality dev teams in my experience).
In other words...
what are you on about? IDEs don't abstract such details away to extreme degrees. In fact, insofar that they ever did (generally in GUI builders, which, what with the web and languages like java and Adobe Air and silverlight falling by the wayside in the past few years for front-end dev - are kinda dead), the new takes on such tools all very explicitly keep the whole 'actually this just edits a text file of some sort and this automated click-the-GUI-together tool is bending over backwards to ensure that the underlying file looks as close as possible to what you would write by hand.
In my current organization I saw a project, where there is no Maven. The build system is a couple of configuration files for Eclipse IDE and that's the only way to run it. I'm glad I didn't have to do anything around that.
That definitely does happen with really poorly considered starting points, but in my experience it's also maybe a day's work to pull that apart and put it into Maven/Gradle (unless you've also got, like, some really terrifying ant stuff to go with it, and even then you can sometimes ask "is this even necessary?" and get with the chopping down).
The ant eclipse plugin does some lifting for you. Sometimes, it can be better this way than having 2 buildthings not in sync... But yeah ant all the way if everyone's happy with it...
I had to fix one such case 6 years ago where the build procedure was to build in IntelliJ.
It took a day or two to get kt over to Maven: basically create a Maven file, make sure everything were in the correct standard Java layout, then build and unzip the war file and compare it to the unzipped war file from the existing build process repeatedly while getting the last tweaks in place.
My team used to have stuff off that nature after we inherited the code base. Acquisition and movement of HQ meant a brand new team on a 15 year old B2B SaaS. Trying to move away from the combination of shell scripts, perl scripts, eclipse config, etc. Over to Gradle has been painful, but with it for onboarding new devs.
If you're not familiar with them, have a look at visual studio SLN files. They are exactly what was described. There is more and more being pushed into the msbuild files instead (a separate format, that is at least theoretically separate from visual studio) but the weird and underdocumented sln file still exists. And msbuild files are absolutely unreadable XML crap anyway, good luck writing one by hand.
>> Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite?
> what are you on about?
This complaint is based on a .NET project I used to work on. I'm sure this isn't universally the case for everything .NET, but I had to work with one instance of visual studio open in the code repository and a second instance of visual studio open in the test repository. Everything we did was configured in and executed through VS. It was pretty nasty.
Poor project management != fault of IDE, it's the one responsible for choosing to configure the project in said way. That's not dismissing the fact that VS and other IDEs allow, and even recommend, nasty setups but, unless they force them, I don't see blaming optional features or poor usage of a tool as a rational reason to write off an entire toolset that can be powerful and productive.
> The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them.
Isn't this the case with Android Studio? Is it even possible to do Android development without Android Studio?
> Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter?
Can you say what language/platform you talk abojt here?
I currently work in Kotlin with IntelliJ where sadly the only working IDE is IntelliJ,but you can build it just fine and even fix bugs using whatever editor you want.
I also maintain a lot of React code, used to work on .Net Core and some plain old C# before Core, I've maintained Angular and before that Java, older Delphi versions and even PHP.
The only projects that had the problem you talk about were
- Visual Studio (not Visul Studio Code) projects from before .Net core
- and old Delphi projects.
That said, I'm kind of stuck with IntelliJ now because of Kotlin (which is an awesome language) but I miss NetBeans a lot and how it - instead of saving everything in its own configuration files - simply accepted Maven .pom files as configuration, meaning uncluttered repos and still having all config synced and up to date everywhere. (Maven is well though out so if you just accept the defaults the files are small and contain only the things they need to contain like name, namespace and version, dependencies and necessary configuration.)
You mean when you or a team chooses to embed them into the project's workflow to that degree? Or are you talking about the worst IDEs no one should use while sounding like it is a general IDE issue with the industry standards?
Any decent IDE doesn't enforce such things, it is something questionable devs choose to incorporate. You may inadvertently do this if you don't know an IDE, and try to use excessive features available, but that's still on you for doing so. It shouldn't have been a decision made by someone lacking in knowledge/experience, whether a junior dev or a senior selecting an unknown tool without proper evaluation.
Or are you implying such features from IDEs can somehow be attained by non-IDE toolchains that don't also ingrain you in those toolchains to make use of said features?
A) that makes managing relevant information more efficient, while not hiding any of that information.
B) vs. a tool that hides some details, providing a tradeoff of higher productivity MOST of the time, but at the cost of requiring a fall back tool on other (rare?) occasions.
I would say, once a tool stops providing access to any (even rarely) relevant details, it has become an abstraction.
Specifically: "The best developers" indeed know how to work without an IDE. They also know 5 programming languages, 50 libraries, and know a whole bevy of esoteric randomness, such as difference between a Thompson-NFA style regex engine and the limitations thereof, or something like that.
There is no such thing as a 'the best developer' that doesn't know much. The 'knows many things and has lots of experience' is a tautologic argument.
In the mean time, bad programmers 'use an IDE a lot and are lost without it'. That's also tautologic.
In other words, your observation proves absolutely nothing, in regards to whether it is wise to use an IDE or not. You're not going to magically turn a bad programmer into a good one by uninstalling their IDE. You're not going to ensure a new programmer is going to turn into a good one if you advise them to forego an IDE, nor will you ruin a potentially good one if you install an IDE on their computer.
> The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one.
The best swimmers can stay afloat with pounds and pounds of weight dragging the down; the worst swimmers will drown. Doesn't mean weighing you down makes you a better swimmer.
Yes, it does; but when you're trying to set a record swimming the English Channel, or escaping from a sinking ship you'd be an idiot to do it deliberately weighing yourself down with weights.
I suppose there's something to be said for both ways of doing things ultimately, depending on what situation you're in, and what your goal is.
...but unconditionally advising people to swim with weights, is simply bad advice.
> when you're trying to set a record swimming the English Channel
Your training time to competition time is about 99:1 (on the high side for the competition time). The record attempts (or the emergencies) are a poor continuation of this analogy when it comes to programming.
> unconditionally advising people to swim with weights, is simply bad advice
So we should advise them to use floats instead, since it makes swimming so much easier?
Well the analogy doesn't actually allow for a starter/bad swimmer as they drown first.
Also, swimmers don't swim with weights to improve technique or strength. I'd expect it would result in unorthodox or worsened technique due to trying to swim around the artificial imbalance of the weights.
> Also, swimmers don't swim with weights to improve technique or strength.
They use the aquatic analog to weights - disabling their arms or legs, drastically increasing drag (via multiple swimsuits, or suits with chute-like pockets), swimming against bungee cords.
Other than bungee cords for small pools/space usage, can't say I've heard of such drag methods, only of resistance training outside of the pool. Though, I didn't mean to take the analogy off-topic, maybe I got too literal.
Exactly this. Productive use of IDEs (or vim, or emacs, or vsc, or …) is the opposite of cargo-culting: one knows exactly how to decompose the abstractions presented by the IDE. Should they fail, or prove limited, one grumbles a bit and then goes and does it by hand.
Using or not using an IDE because good developers use but don’t need an IDE misses the point. It’s never the choice of tool, it’s knowing how to use it.
But you don't use git to write your code. Code autocompletion and cross referencing are pretty big productivity boosters that won't prevent you from learning command line git. Also I bet you don't use the command line for diffing files.
Also the problems is that most IDEs half ass their git client. When I was using Sourcetree, I rarely ever felt the need to go to the command line.
> Also I bet you don't use the command line for diffing files.
Wait, isn't this normal? I run "diff" and "git diff" all the time (I think I have those both set up to invoke colordiff, but it's still a command line program). Also vim -d.
Occasionally I browse diffs on Github or Bitbucket instead. I don't find it an improvement. I do favour editors over IDEs, but I don't think I'm an extremist on this one.
For my sibling using `git diff`, can i introduce you to tig[0]? I think it is inferior to magit, but you can install and test it with `apt install tig` and then `tig` in a git directory.
Being able to do the wrong thing should not be confused with power. It's just a broken tool, that is broken so often, it needs this so-called "power" to clean up after it when it shits the bed.
The Git tools built into IDEs are indeed very convenient, but I often warn junior (and even mid) developers to NOT use them unless you understand exactly what they’re doing.
Nah if you ever used a modern IDE from the jetbrains line. In order to even get the IDE working with a project you need to configure it to work.
That absolutely necessitates understanding of the details of what's going on. You are literally building automation by using additional tooling. It doesn't build it for you.
Also screwing up a git repo, what does that even mean? A bad commit?
If you have a Maven project, IntelliJ will open it and configure itself automatically. The IDE user doesn't need to know anything about Maven build configurations. It just works.
The Maven Project IS the configuration. Intellij is only a shortcut. It let's you access configurations via click rather than via a command line expression.
In the end if you want to create a Maven Project configuration or edit the configuration it's on you to do it. At most intellij will just generate boilerplate for you.
No that's not how it works. IDEA has its own project files (*.iml, .idea), separate from Maven. We are talking about IDE projects which are separate from Maven.
Yes that's configuration for the IDE. But the project itself is configured off of Maven, the project files for the IDE are ADDITIONAL settings for the IDE itself.
For example in CLion you can't create a new target from the IDE, you have to edit the cmake file.
I'm not even sure what to make of this. No sane developer I know will work without an IDE, much less prefer not using an IDE.
Sure, we can probably write code without an IDE but in what way does that mean I'm a better developer? I feel myself cringing whenever I hear that a developer is going to reach for TextEdit or Notepad++ to write code.
Those editors aren't really part of the conversation anymore. I would say they were maybe over 12 years ago. Not so nowadays.
People are referring to SublimeText, Vim, Emacs, VSCode as Programming Text editors. VSCode is currently the most popular with vim as purist second and Emacs for "elite" hackers.
The "programming text editors"/"code editors" of now that are used in place of traditional IDEs are practically always extended to, by definition, being an IDE, albeit a leaner, more custom-fit one.
I'm really just asking, do you think VSCode is a text editor? I used to put it in the same categories as IDE (and thought that it was really better than Netbeans and Eclipse)
The lines have blurred. I would put it more in the editor category. You really need to download plugins for it to come close to an IDE and it's not as feature complete as say pycharm or Clion.
I would say VSCode is more in the code editor category, but as I said before the lines are blurring. With enough plugins and configuration even vim and emacs can straddle that line.
In general IDE's tend to have more features less bugs, and have all of these features out of the box.
That's just confusing big-brand mature IDE suites as the definition for IDE though. Any dev working on an actual project is going to be using those tools with plugins/extensions, configured as an IDE.
A dev would require completely separate tools that provide that functionality to say otherwise.
> The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one.
"Best" is a marketing term. How do you mean it as it applies to software quality or productivity?
I'm trying to understand if you're serious, since the author (who notes "I myself use IntelliJ, CLion and MySQL workbench almost everyday") doesn't even seem to believe what he's writing.
“Power drills have batteries or cords and motors that wear down and they’re more expensive and complex and can break more easily and it’s just smarter to bring hand crank tools to the worksite.”
Power drills are simple tools, they are the 'vi' equivalent of the 'ed' manual drill.
The physical equivalent of an IDE would be a laser-guided auto-centering/levelling drill with automatic drill bit changer/sharpener, depth guide, dust evacuation and material sensor with automatic lookup for which hole size and depth to use for the given task. It would weigh 15 kg, need an external power pack and be unusable in tight corners. For some tasks it would be a great time saver, for others it would just be in the way. Some workers would love it, others would fight it. Some would be more productive using it, others would be far more productive if only that damn megadrill did not insist on using that oversized drill bit while they knew the construction would be much stronger by using a slightly smaller bit, necessitating them to override the megadrill tool selector for each and every hole they drilled.
CNC mills are super useful. But not all the time. I regularly (not all the time, or even a majority, but regularly) choose a manual mill over my cnc because for simple jobs that only require a part or two, it's faster than setting up the 3d model, deciding on cutting strategies, setting up the tools, etc.
My choice in editors follows the same logic. If I just need to jot down some notes, or knock together a simple bash script or something, it doesn't really matter what I use. Whatever has syntax highlighting and is available on that system is great. Something more complex, where I don't want to spend brain cycles on repetitive tasks or management that the tools can handle for me, I'd rather use something that will handle that for me.
No, a CNC machine is a distinct entity which enables the user to create objects which can not be created using only a power drill. The lower-tech predecessor of a CNC machine is a milling machine [1], not a hand-held drill.
There isn’t anything a CNC can make that someone with a file and a lot of times on their hands cant.
Heck you can do that with a drill too mostly using jigs.
I had to create a few times quite complex shapes from a block of aluminum and what I did I just 3D print a bunch of jigs and drilled out 98-99% of the material away in the same way a CNC would and finished it with dremmel.
> There isn’t anything a CNC can make that someone with a file and a lot of times on their hands cant.
True, but the comparison here was against a power drill, not a person with a file and lots of time on his hands. While it may be theoretically possible to achieve the accuracy of a CNC mill using a power drill it would not be the tool of choice. Achieving the repeatability of a CNC mill using hand tools is hard, the more complex the piece the harder it becomes.
To get back to basics without getting lost in a forest of tools these comparisons are based around the 'To IDE, or not to IDE' question. The CNC mill was pulled in through a side door but doesn't really feature in the comparison which was between a simple power drill and the hypothetical 'smart drill' I dubbed 'megadrill' which tries to be as 'helpful' as possible. Some people would like such a contraption, others would shun it.
I don't feel I pulled in the CNC through a side door, I was responding to your comment of:
`laser-guided auto-centering/leveling drill with automatic drill bit changer/sharpener, depth guide, dust evacuation and material sensor with automatic lookup for which hole size and depth to use for the given task.`
Which at that point you probably, as I said, just want a CNC machine.
Given I have and use a handheld drill, a drill press, a manual mill, a CNC mill, a manual lathe, and a CNC lathe, as well as Vim, Emacs, VS Code, and Intellij, I think I'm decently well informed on this topic.
If you setup a CNC mill, you can use it as a manual mill, some people just don't like those ergonomics. I mainly keep my manual mill as a better drill press, and use the CNC for most stuff.
I generally just use intellij for everything in the same way.
I think both your and parent's analogy are somewhat off.
IDE is like a big machine that can make a variety of parts to the exact spec very fast with minimal waste. This machine can help even inexperienced operator become productive in short time.
vi/ed is like manual power tools that can accomplish the same task but it takes a lot longer, wastes a lot more material and only experienced operators can be somewhat productive but nowhere near what they could achieve with the big machine.
When users become experts with these tools, they can produce all sorts of custom parts that big machine is not configured for but like they always say - use the right tool for the job: if you are making 5 custom parts then use the hand tools, when you are making hundreds of the same part, use the big machine.
No, a Hole-Hawg [1] - made famous in these circles by Neal Stephenson's essay 'In the beginning was the command line' [1] - is just a powerful drill without any bells and whistles, a "lump of metal with a handle sticking out of it". It would be more sort of an 'ed on steroids', trading off ease of use for raw power.
I think you've hit upon an important distinction, because while construction workers won't be bringing hand tools "to the worksite," there are in fact many people who do use hand tools for fine woodworking in their woodshops.
People work with wood for different reasons and people write software for different reasons. All of these tools and approaches can be valid.
Some may be interested in rapid and low cost large scale construction - big teams working fast. Others may be interested in creating a thing of beauty either independently or in small groups of likeminded craftsmen. It shouldn't be surprising that we have many different tools and practices.
Exactly. When I’m tinkering around in Scheme crafting cutesy little interpreters a simple text editor is great, and having an IDE would feel like having someone standing over my shoulder whispering to me every rule of a game I already know by heart.
On the other hand, when I’m working on a new area in a several thousand file project with dozens of contributors, or any number of its side-projects that I may have never seen before in my life, it’s more like having talented counsel at my shoulder informing me of all the various contracts I’d be expected to observe for any possible plan of action I might consider taking.
Conversely, for model building, I have much better results using #80 drill bits in a hand held twist drill than trying to chuck them into a power drill and hope that it will not break the bit or rip the delicate work asunder.
Similarly, an IDE can be overkill when you're writing a self-contained one-off task, or dealing with an opinionated IDE that doesn't fit with the project you're importing.
Wouldn't another analogy be knowing how to navigate a boat with a sextant and a chronometer versus modern radio and GPS maritime navigational aides? The latter's more efficient, but those with deep knowledge of navigation understand how to use the former if necessary.
As someone replied to GP, you should definitely know how to complete tasks with only basic tools and without advanced tools. But it doesn't mean you should only use basic tools or no tools at all. I mean I do know how to calculate without calculator but it doesn't mean I dont use calculator. I use it all the time. Of course deep knowledge almost always means that you have a strong hold on the basics.
Portable electric power tools are such a game changer when working on cars. I could never go back to the days of doing it by hand, it would be ten times worse for construction.
I would never use power tools on my motorcycle or car. On threading, nuts/bolts/screws should always be torqued gently into spec. On unthreading, I prefer to feel if there's significant resistance, warranting a cleaning/deoxidization of the part.
Predrilling a screw hole in some hard wood? Yeah I don't need to feel anything except the power of lithium cells dumping electricity into torque.
There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless.
For editing or just navigating the source files, the smarter the editor is, the better.
On the other hand I have never seen any IDE where the management of projects (e.g. adding/deleting/moving/renaming files and setting compilation/linking options) and the compilation/building/running functions are as simple and fast as how that can be done without using an IDE (if you know how to do it in the right way).
Especially the Eclipse-based IDE's provided by many vendors of embedded products are the worst offenders.
I have wasted too much time with helping puzzled coworkers to find where in the hierarchy of IDE menus one could find whatever was needed. Even when knowing where to find the commands, using the IDE menus was many orders of magnitude slower than what I could do outside the IDE to perform the same function upon the project.
> There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless.
I know VSCode is positioned this way in the market, probably to differentiate it from VS. And I switched to it from a much less “smart” editor (TextMate, which I still adore! No offense meant to TM creator/maintainers!).
I’m having a hard time seeing this as a clear distinction, however. I mean, VSCode has a built in debugger/protocol, language server/protocol/intellisense, file system aware refactoring, code rewriting refactoring, integrated git client, inline blame and history navigation, GitHub integration, linter integration including automated fixes…
I understand it’s a different tool than VS, but I honestly don’t have a clear understanding of what separates editor from IDE in this case.
I think the difference is that when you start out with VSCode, you tend to do things by editing text and using the CLI, and with time you add plugins and tools that makes it more into an IDE. When starting out with IntelliJ or Pycharm or whatever, you first start by trying to understand the IDE itself to generate your project, and then you start writing code inside the project. A bit like libraries and frameworks. At least that has been my experience.
My experience has been that I’ve installed very few extensions, and all of them improve the editing experience. I haven’t added anything that provides an IDE experience, I just use those features that are built in.
The comments have just devolved into people arguing or confusing mature big-brand IDEs, with excessive and all-encompassing features, as the definition for an IDE.
Anything lesser, they're calling a simple code editor but, by actual definition, they are referring to a lighter IDE (as the ones that can be installed as base editors they have all extended with plugins/extensions to that point) and then acting like the topic is about the big-brand IDEs, even though it is making points against tooling they are all using with their "editors" just like what you're using VSCode for.
The good editors for programmers, since ancient times, for example already in the BRIEF editor for MS-DOS, before 1990, provide means to attach arbitrary CLI commands or scripts to menus or keyboard shortcuts.
Therefore, if you want you can invoke from inside the editor any commands needed for project management or for compiling/linking/running/debugging.
So in the end you are right that a powerful editor can do what an IDE does, after some customization.
The main difference with IDE's is that the project management provided by the IDE is normally non-optional, you are forced to always use it.
In 30 years of experiencing a very large number of IDE's I have not seen even a single one where using its project management functions would not waste a lot of time comparing to non-integrated alternatives.
I think that it is sad that only a very small number of developers know how to use correctly the ancient program "make". I do not know why this happened. To use correctly "make" I have never needed anything else besides reading the GNU make manual provided with gmake, but it seems that very few people read the manual.
The only time when I had to write makefiles was more than 20 years ago, when I have written a set of universal makefiles, which I have been using unchanged for every software project ever since. For any new project I need to just (optionally) add a file with some extra definitions, e.g. a list of directories where the source files are located or the names of the executables or libraries that must be built. If no definitions are provided, suitable defaults are used, e.g. the directory with the Makefile also contains the source files and the target is an executable with the same name as the directory. The Makefile per target directory may contain just a single line, with an include directive for the universal makefile. The universal makefile searches all the source directories for all the possible types of source files, selects automatically the appropriate compilers based on the language indicated by the file name extensions and on the cross-compilation target if one is specified, generates automatically all the dependencies and so on.
Instead of using "make" like this, almost all the open-source projects that I have seen have huge and immensely complicated makefiles that are much more difficult to read, understand and modify than the source files of the programs. When the makefiles are generated from templates, those are typically even more difficult to understand and modify.
I have no idea who loves those extremely complex methods of compiling and building software projects.
During the years, a lot of replacements for "make" have been introduced, which are better than "make" used wrongly, but I have not seen any which is better than "make" used rightly, without pointless complications.
It is not published, but there is not really much about it, except exploiting most features provided by gmake.
For easy maintenance, the universal makefile is split into 4 files that are completely universal + 1 makefile with extra definitions per each combination of operating system and CPU type that might be a target for compilation.
The extra files for specific compilation targets, e.g. skylake-linux-gnu, armv7e-m4-none-eabi, i686-cygwin and so on, contain definitions for the names of all the tools that might be used, e.g. compilers for various programming languages, linking commands, librarian commands, binary file modification commands (e.g. objcopy), default locations for library files, default locations for include files, default values for compilation flags.
The 4 completely universal files do not contain directly any command name or command flags or any file name or any directory name. They contain only variable names whose values are either defined in the operating system/CPU specific makefile or whose values are determined by the make command by scanning the project and by transforming the found files, e.g. by replacing the file name extensions.
The 4 completely universal files are:
1. A file for the top directory of a complex project, which descends recursively in all subdirectories and runs there the given make command, if a Makefile exists in the subdirectory
2. A file with make targets. Examples of make targets:
4. A file with definitions, which is the most important in simplifying the makefiles needed for any new project, which are typically almost empty, because they do not need any other line besides including the universal makefile, even if I usually add a definition with a list of source directories, in order to separate the place where the project is built from the place where the source files are stored and possibly some options, e.g. building a debug version instead of a release version, or building for a cross-compilation target.
Example how to determine the directories with source files:
I use many more kinds of source files, so the OBJS above is just a shortened example.
The operating system/CPU type specific makefile includes the 3 universal files with targets, rules and definitions and it also includes the automatically generated dependencies:
include $(OBJS:.o=.d)
so later only the specific makefile needs to be included, depending on the compilation target.
There are many more details, but these are the general principles. They are intended to make me write as little as possible in the Makefile for a new project.
If I do not define in the Makefile from the project directory what shall be built with "make all", then either an executable is built, having the same name as the Makefile directory, or another kind of file is built, if the directory has a special suffix, e.g. a static library for a directory ending in "_lib".
When I add, delete, move or rename source files, I do not have to do anything for project management, except doing a "make clean" before that, because the next "make" will update the lists of source files.
Regarding especially Eclipse, project and build management in an IDE can be good. Typical Java projects that use Maven and are built "officially" with scripts and CI systems without an IDE can be worked on by Eclipse quite cleanly by
- Checking sources out of version control
- "Importing" them in the Eclipse workspace as projects from existing code in an arbitrary location
- Configuring what Maven installation, and with what configuration files, is to be used to build your projects
- Defining a grimoire of Maven command lines (build and test locally, build and deploy somewhere else, package for release, etc.) as run/debug configurations
The impact is limited to harmless project metadata files (containing nothing important that isn't mirrored from Maven POM files) and repeating in the closed world of Eclipse options configurations, paths etc. that are probably already in scripts, CI pipeline definitions and so on.
A lot of this is starting to result in talking semantics of what an IDE is. A powerful/smart code editor, extended to have the functionality most will ever use an IDE for (and definitely incorporating the base definition of what an IDE is), ends up being argued as different because the base product didn't start as an IDE or it isn't as feature-rich as the mature, big-brand IDEs people have grown up hearing. Why people are even playing semantics with this when the topic is making points against tooling, that programmers are very much using with tools like VSCode, I really don't understand.
The tooling and layout of the same functionality you choose to use is something more modern tools, and product versions, have improved upon but is unrelated to what an IDE is. It also differs between tools and IDEs. For you to say you've never used an IDE with simple or fast file handling is either a lie or a severe lack of experience, as almost all decent ones have a 1 or 2-click approach via the explorer (and toolbar/hotkeys if you don't like an explorer side-pane). I actually can't think of any half-decent IDE that doesn't have the same approach for files as popular code editors, and I've used a lot of both for different platforms and languages. The only time I've had noticeable experiences is in cases via command/terminal but we're talking GUI editors here.
Worth noting, I have never in my career found myself mentioning any Eclipse-based IDE as an example of a good IDE. In fact, almost every dev I've ever met regards them as the worst IDEs they have experienced, not as a baseline standard for or expectation of IDEs. It's basically redundant to comment on x experience being bad as anyone that has ever used one already knows that is expected.
Rubymine can, with one click, make an ER diagram of your ActiveRecord model -- from the code, not the db schema. That pays for itself right there, especially if you're learning someone else's code base. Try it for a day, you'll never go back.
I've used it before. I found it valuable, but there were a number of reasons I went back to a smart editor instead. I do use Jet Brain's DataGrip, so I'm a big fan of their tools overall.
> …but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy.
This is the vi vs emacs debate transposed to build tools and as such will never conclude. Some like their tools to be as "complete" as possible, others want them out of the way. You might be closer to the first camp, I'm close to the second, others are in between. All of these choices are fine, there is no canonical truth here and as such the "nonsense" label used above is just that, nonsensical.
Dunno, I kind of like no IDE. If you use an IDE, it's basically editor + a bunch of command line tools being invoked from the IDE's interface. You can also just use an editor + those command line tools from a terminal. It's the same functionality with a slightly different workflow and IMO not worse.
I disagree with the author's dislike of code completion tools but somewhat agree with the other points. In particular how some IDEs create their own project structure.
It's not being lazy. There is no need for me to use an Integrated Development Environment.
Many of the most highly productive people use Separated Development Environments. The integration is most times not necessary. I have never had an IDE provide a feature that I needed and couldn't quickly create or obtain.
People let you install your tools in your monolithic IDE package. Why are you so insistent on degrading people who are experts in their fields?
It kind of depends on how we are defining IDE. Every developer I know who doesn't use an IDE uses either VS Code, vim or emacs with a bunch of plugins which approximate IDE functionality (but are much more customizable and configurable which I suspect is what they like about it). At the end of the day every IDE is just a text editor with plugins too. It really comes down to whether you want something that just works (and probably forces you to do some things THEIR way on some margin) or you want to tweak your dev environment to be just right for your workflow.
Yeah, that's true. For me, it'd be somewhat irritating to work without LSP features like "jump to definition," "hover to view doc string," or even tab completion. Arguably, these are IDE features. But when it comes to higher-level features like build tooling or even grepping, I'd much rather work from a command line.
Something like tab completion can't exist outside the editor, but as soon as features can exist as separate tools, bundling them together begins to feel like a limitation. Having separate tools means you can discard the ones you don't need, which is part of what leads to fully-featured IDEs feeling so bloated to me.
True. I've been slowly moving towards VSCode from IntelliJ over the past year or so and that has mostly been driven by better Scala LSP implementation (Metals has gotten immeasurably better over that time). And even when I used IntelliJ exclusively, I more or less used it as a text editor with code completion/jump to definition. I still used a separate terminal for git, builds, etc.
I think there are also certain efficiencies that come with bundling as well though. You end up with a bunch of things specifically designed to work together so they in some cases are better than the generic, composable tools. I still find myself firing up IntelliJ from time to time because sometimes it just seems to work better (faster, more responsive, etc) even though the feature I am using technically exists in VSCode + Metals.
In 20 years of working as an engineer and also interviewing, I’ve seen maybe 3 people that could be as productive without an IDE. They certainly exist, but I believe they are rare exceptions.
For me the choice is more a) tooling that does everything but distracts me all the time b) tooling with some limitations but versatile, consistent across languages and completely modular.
I'm not rejecting IDEs because I didn't like one thing. I like nothing about IDEs except the refactoring feature; but even that doesn't make up for the painful UX. IDEs are like MS Word: they do everything I need but I hate every moment of it.
“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
Henry David Thoreau
One day the IDE will do most of the coding. Users will just click “ok” and spend most of their time asking IT to reboot and reinstall things until it all just works(tm).
This isn't an actual verbatim Thoreau quote, it's rather a mishmash of disparate sentences from Walden,[0] so perhaps the use of the quotes is mistaken.
The sentences do carry a general spirit, however, which is very nice and pleasing, until you're reminded that Thoreau's rugged existence in nature was supported by his mum cooking him dinner.
I would instead offer the following sentence from Walden as a better encapsulation:
"The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten."
Namely, our arts and crafts come to cater to the alleviation of the burden of our physicality, yet neglect the needs of our spirituality.
I doubt that either the command line or an IDE can cater much to spirituality, although I've heard some argue that there's much food for the soul in Emacs and Lisp.
The internet is a tool that I’ve again become tool of, it seems. The fuller context of the quote I was searching for I think still applies as much to IDEs as emacs. Lisp is arguably a more solid and earthly foundation.
But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.”
The US Navy is teaches C without an IDE. This makes sense for them. If they had institutional knowledge going back to the 1970s, it all still pretty much applies and looks the same as it did 50 years ago, or another 50 years from now.
Yes. You should use a good tooling if your goal is to make something.
Definitely. There's no dichotomy though. I use some of the features of my IDE: editing obviously, interactive debugging and just general exploration via Ctrl-click are infinitely faster and more powerful than anything I've used on the command line. It's not great for everything though. So I keep swapping to the terminal for everything which I find more effective there: Git, running tests, creating projects, and the like.
Basically, don't think a single toolset is always going to be superior to your other toolsets. Feel free to mix and match, and change over from one toolset to the other when it's convenient or just more efficient. But of course moderation isn't going to get the clicks.
Your sentiment about the right tools for the job is spot on, and one should strive to choose tools that make you more productive but IDEs are one tool of many.
There's a host of other things to consider, like what is the testing environment like, library management, repository layout, etc. When you're working across a wide variety of languages, setups, environments, etc. choosing an IDE like Eclipse or Atom might not always be the right tool for the job. This also completely neglects the fact that vi/vim and Emacs, while mostly considered "text editors", can be enhanced to essentially be IDEs in their own right.
I think the article's arguments are weak, but so is this counter-argument, sorry.
It seems to really depend on the type of work that you are doing. If you write high level code using many external libraries in a language like Java, using an IDE can be a time saver. If you are write low level C code, I found that using an IDE does not seem to be that helpful. But that's just my 2c.
What? No, sorry, your comment is the nonsense. Not using an IDE doesn't mean 'no tooling', it just means 'different tooling we don't happen to call 'IDE''.
I think it's so blurry now as to be a pointless debate anyway - is VS Code an 'IDE'? Or is it an editor with a load of plug-ins available that give it equivalent functionality to an IDE? Because the latter definitely applies to vim and emacs and sublime too, and if it's the first, then... A lot of people don't use an IDE!
Me too I dislike this kind of absolute statements about IDEs.
The author make a few good points about abusing some features; just like abusing any tool beyond their intended purposes.
IMO the best is the compromise of making the code IDE agnostic. So yeah, I do use IDEs and other tools in conjunction to that the tools I used and the skills I know are not bound to a specific project.
jesus christ. coding used to mean something. i guess we all should eat baby food because we arent being smart cool or clever by wasting time and energy chewing.
I consider not needing to remember library and api details a benefit. I'd rather dedicate my brain cycles to something else. As for syntax, I don't recall ever struggling to remember syntax of languages I frequently code in.
Also the point about IDEs auto generating toHashCode, toString, etc. If your class needs these methods, whether they were auto generated or not seems besides the point. The point the IDE is "compensating for lacking language features" doesn't make sense to me, the code is compensating, whether a human or IDE writes it.
Why do doctors memorize medicines and their effects? Because it's faster to retrieve from memory than from documentation, even automatically presented documentation. It removes a context switch.
The "brain cycles" are only run while doing the memorization, not while actually doing the work.
> I don't recall ever struggling to remember syntax of languages I frequently code in.
You can't easily consider a treatment or remedy or library function you don't remember. Better to use all the tools at hand (memory being a useful tool - a L2 cache as it were) than handicap yourself by only using a few.
I'd rather have my doctor consulting recent knowledge base than use their 30 year old memories from school. Medicine is not set in stone and recommendations change.
The problem with using cache is that you can feel certain it's correct but you don't really know until you check with the source. And since you check with the source anyway, the cache becomes a drag to correctness
Do they have every single medicine memorized, or just the ones they most commonly use? Sure, I tend to remember the parts of libraries and apis I use often, but I'd still argue my editor having a reminder just a keystroke away is very beneficial.
There are over 20,000 approved medications in the US. I don't really feel like this analogy is holding up very well. But, have I happened to remember about 200 or so API and library calls over my career? Probably.
Yeah the idea that I have to remember everything in our codebase of millions of LoC made up of TS, JS, Ruby, Kotlin, and Java is ridiculous. IDEs allow me to drop into these codebases and be decently productive from the get go.
When you start to work with too many languages frequently, using syntax from one while writing another is common and IDEs really help at this point. I too prefer not to remember APIs and methods, but with time, our brain starts maintaining a cache of these. Completions make this faster.
That and error detection are only features I like in IDEs. For everything else, dedicated tools are often better (but not necessarily easier) than integrated ones.
I understand, I just wonder if he/she really means to it. Who knows, some people have very good memory. When I work with a new (for me) topic, I am trying to get basic understanding of topic, still it far from remembering exact method signatures.
There is a common perception with electric bicycles that the rider will pedal less hard to go the same speed. But there is an alternative: they could pedal the same amount and go faster.
I kind of view IDEs like that. You can use it as a crutch, or you can take the energy you would have used thinking about the things the IDE is now doing for you and focus it elsewhere.
To extend that analogy, I choose a regular bicycle because I ride for fun and exercise, not speed. But if biking were a serious mode of transportation for me, I would get one that gave me the most assistance possible so I could go faster and farther.
IDEs are similar. If you want to be as efficient as possible and get as much done as possible, you want an IDE. But if learning and exercising your mind is the goal, you’d be better served with a text editor.
There has been a great surge of ebikers among people working in food delivery services around Prague last year. Before that most of the guys used regular bikes.
Now imagine your job being to get from point A to B. 99.5% of all the devs I've seen that insist on "VS Code" struggle so bad it's laughable, and yet when you point it out they turn it into some sort of IDE pissing contest.
veering off-topic, that's one of the problems I have with electric bikes - they stop being bicycles and become another kind of vehicle - a faster vehicle that needs longer stopping distances and now has a highe r fatality rate when colliding with a pedestrian.
We see this in London cycle lanes. Some cycles are doing a commute, some are trying out for the olympics, some people are doing 25 on a electric scooter and these are alien - hard to predict because they don't obey our intuition about physics. A guy on a scooter does 10mph tops and puts his foot down a lot.
What blows my mind is that in New York, we've decided to deal with this by requiring speed governors on pedal-assist bicycles to limit them to around 20mph... while they're required to share the street with cars that are free to travel at almost any speed.
The key difference is whether a motorcycle driver's license is required. The electric bicycle manufacturer can choose to forgo the speed governors and be subject to motorcycle safety/licensing/etc regulations.
Traffic rules basically give drivers a way to deal with other vehicles going different speeds. So a the driver of a scooter going 20 mph and the driver of a car going 40 mph can share the same road, just like a driver of a truck going 40 mph can share the road with the driver of a car going 60 mph.
(They've also done some more motorized cycle and electric content lately. A recent video showed how to rebuild an old motorcycle's frame into an electric motorcycle using a kit.)
An e-bike that goes 60kph seems a bit out of the ordinary. Most are limited to 25kph or 45kph. But even 45 is still fast with only a bicycle helmet though
I see, your own peddling can make them go faster. Ok these things should be illegal!
Nitpicking, but in the world of regulations, electric assist tapers off until around 25-30 km/h, at which point you start carrying the entire bike anyway, plus the dead weight of the battery and the motor.
I wonder if this simile could be extended to programming. Being hindered by not being able to choose your own tools?
Not everywhere. Australia supports both the European pedelec classification of 250W with a 25km/h cutout and a local one of 200W with no speed limit (which can be hand-throttle in some states but must be pedal-assist in others). New Zealand just has a flat 300W with no speed limit.
I live out in the country in Australia. I’m planning a velomobile with an auxiliary motor for both touring and local use, and with this combination I expect and hope to attain an average speed of over 50km/h for the ~39km trip to the nearest town for church and groceries on Sundays. (I currently tend to average 22–24km/h on my recumbent tricycle with no motor, the trip typically taking 1h35–1h50m, with an estimated average power output of 120W. 200W is quite a lot to add!)
In the US, class 3 electric bicycles can assist up to 28 miles per hour, or around 45 km/h. I might be able to ride 28 miles per hour on a regular bicycle, but I can't do it for very long.
Are they regulated like non-electric bikes? In Europe, I believe the main difference is insurance and license, which are required for e-bikes with motor-supported speeds > 25km/h (at least in some countries, not sure how uniform it's handled).
As far as I know there is no jurisdiction in the US where you need either a license or auto insurance for a class 3 electric pedal assist bicycle. I think you generally ride them wherever regular bicycles are ridden.
Sometimes people need to prove that they are a rare breed of pure developer. Their superior discipline and tastemaking in the development toolchain far surpasses the masses of regular developers who are dependent on old slow crutches to get any meaningful work done.
Meanwhile there are real 10x developers out there that while they care about the tools stay out of the weeds of them.
This line of blog post reminds me of a Paul McCartney interview I read where someone asked him what kind of strings he uses on his guitar. Paul replied “shiny ones”. I think Paul is actually a lot more technical than he lets on in interviews and probably knew full well what kind they were. What he communicated to the person asking the question was that it doesn’t matter so much.
Well, this is my friends and me in my early 20s.
The only true way is to use vim/emacs, CLI tools for everything. GUI is for losers.
And the only TRUE and SERIOUS languages for COOL KIDS are C++, Haskell, and Perl. If you don't use them, you are code monkey.
And here I am, doing everything in typescript for my job, use VSCode and Webstorm, in love with GitKraken. What a shame. I'm not a cool kid anymore.
Apparently, VSCode is considered a text Editor. And i mean, if you played with Netbeans and Eclispe, and are now working with VSCode, this whole thread would seems a bit weird to you.
The main difference i see between Text editor and IDEs: with text editors you need to add your own configuration and tooling, and this can takes time, while with IDE everything is already in and you just need to learn the quirks.
But right now, i'm working to integrate programs with OCS pods and weird network architecture (we can only interrogate some APIs from the Openshift cluster as a security mesure), and my collegues who only ever worked with IDEs have a development cycle that look like this:
Write code => push => build new image=> deploy pod with new image => get the input and correct mistakes => repeat
I just work withing the pod (i use vim because its everywhere, but i could build the pod with VSCode inside, it is light enough).
So i'll say this: imho if you're in for a short-term contract, learn to use you employer IDE. If you think you'll stay a long time AND you like to have tailor-made tools for you, you can consider a text editor. Whichever choice you make, always learn a new language with the least tooling help you can get (in Eclipse you can deactivate stuff), and learn ed or Vim if you might go DevOps in the future.
The author seems to use IDE for one purpose only: to auto-generate boilerplate code. But this is far from the only benefits of IDEs!
I rarely use IDEs for code generation, I don't even like autocomplete. For this stuff I use code snippets; I develop collections of those for any language I use. You don't need an IDE for it; any good text editor has such features.
For me really important features of a good IDE are:
- Navigation. Being able to right-click on a function or method name and jump to its definition is very handy.
Yeah, I may remember where it's defined; I can also use grep (which does not work all that well for methods).
But jumping is so much faster and does not take you out of the flow.
- Code refactoring. I am refactoring code continuously as I work with it. Even simple stuff like renaming a variable or a function (or a method!) is much easier with an IDE.
- Error highlighting.
Note: I can and sometimes do work without an IDE (esp with more obscure languages which don't have good IDE support).
There is some fun it it too, like going camping and living for a while without creature comforts like running water and electricity. But normally, if a tool is available, why not use it?
About languages: I agree that a well-designed language allows you to factor away most boilerplate code. (This was one thing I really liked about Perl! It basically allows you to develop a language dialect for your particular needs. The downside with Perl was that everybody was "reducing boilerplate" in their own way, but this is another story)
There are languages and environments that are more prone to requiring IDEs.
For example, when I write React and I use the Foo component, either it is defined on the same file or it is in one of the imports.
On the other hand, with Angular, the foo component is not imported anywhere. In fact, there is no foo component, just one or many Foo components which declare to use the foo tag, and one or another may be loaded depending on the context of the current component. Good luck getting anything done with such an obfuscated environment without tools to deobfuscate it.
And then you have the heavy enterprise frameworks that make a science out of obfuscated code, so that you don't know what code is being executed, because it is hidden behind several layers of inheritance and interfaces, and the instance to create is choosen via xml-configurable meta-programming based dependency injector. Working with such code is guaranteed insanity without heavy IDEs. I would say it's also insanity with heavy IDEs, but people tend to find that opinion controversial.
this so much. it's priceless to just type a line and have some warnings such as "hey, you're moving this value but using the variable afterwards, take care" or "hey, it looks like you are only using this argument as a reference, consider not passing it by value" just pop up next to the offending line ; when compared to an IDE-less workflow I pretty much divide the amount of hitting "build" I need by ten or more since the IDE tells me everything wrong beforehand.
And it's not "reimplementing" the whole IDE, it's choosing and configuring parts to work just the way you want it to, and it's usually done in a handful of lines.
a handful of lines + the additional processes that do the parsing behind the scene. Just because it's split across multiple processes doesn't not make it an IDE.
By refactor do you mean rename across the project, or extracting a chunk of code out into a function/method?
Rename across the project is introduced by lsps.
As for renaming, I don't use it particularly often, but it's documented in microsoft's code action documentation[0] to include: Extract method, Extract function, Extract variable, Extract interface from class (some of those might be language/server dependent).
The neovim framework[1] at least does provide a wrapper for the code action.
VSCode gets most of its capabilities outside text editing from language servers. So the rule of thumb is that if VSCode has it, vim/neovim/emacs usually have it these days.
I know I'll make some people not happy by saying this but the only reason you need so much complex IDE tooling with Java compared to other languages is because the language itself & the tools associated to it are not very well designed. Just about everything requires some insane boilerplate where it should not.
It's not a solution to a problem, it's a problem searching for a solution.
I don't entirely disagree. But the situation is what it is.
The reality is that Java at this point is a mature platform broadly supported by many, many stakeholders. Its benefits and issues are, in general, decently well known and understood.
Billions (likely even trillions) of lines of Java are running in production today and those applications will need to be maintained moving forward. IDEs make Java development a much more pleasant experience and so there will be a place for IDEs.
Yes I do understand why things evolved that way, it does make sense, all the tooling is there to improve the environment. I just personally don't want to work with such tech as much as I can though.
I'd like to point out that you don't need an IDE for error reporting. Most editors these days integrate with a language server for inline errors and linting. Even features such as jump-to have existed in Vim/emacs for many years.
I would add graphical debuggers to your list. You can get by with command line debuggers and there are external attachable debuggers but neither is really comparable to an IDE.
I left them out because I very rarely use them, unfortunately. It's my personal vice, of sort.
I tried to learn to use and love them, more than once, but never learned to be more efficient with them than without, and when a deadline hits, usually drop them and never look back.
I grew up as a programmer without graphical debuggers, developed a rather sophisticated way to debug with essentially "print" statements, but on steroids -- I have a library of debugging utilities which I kind of recreate for any language I am working with. I've a habit to anticipate where they may be needed, and my code is usually peppered with commented out debugging statements (of course all of them generated via code snippets), which help me to be very efficient in debugging my code.
I must say that some of my collaborators over the years hated it, others loved it, adapted my system and used it in their own code.
I think it would be good to un-learn this habit and learn to use debuggers efficiently, and to produce a bit more conventional code. On the other hand, life is short, and there are only so many fights you can hope to win...
It's easier than you think! I picked up command line debugging in a couple days when working with software that was extremely difficult to printf debug.
Not having an IDE doesn't make me remember things. In my case it just means I use a very limited subset of the features, because I'm not being reminded of the things I don't remember and I don't get to see newer language features unless I happen to read a blog post or see something here on HN. I tend to fall back to implementing things with primitives and fail to use built-in functionality.
For the longest time I was a proponent of limited tooling. In many cases its good to know what you're automating or simplifying because I often found myself in situations where I may have environments I need to do things where I didn't have my tooling to lean on.
In the past, this was possible without too much pressure on cognitive load. In modern code bases with all sorts of libraries and layers of abstraction ontop of abstraction ontop of abstraction ad infinitum, it's just not feasible anymore. I got to a point in certain development ecosystems where not relying on tooling started to really hinder me. Self reliance was no longer a strength and a point occurred where I simply had to lean on more and more tooling or I'd be lost.
I still think if you have tooling that does something, you should understand what it's doing and how it's doing, at least once, then let it do every subsequent need for that task. It's good not to have black boxes in your ecosystem. Unfortunately even that is becoming difficult because of the number of layers of abstraction in some ecosystems (especially web development).
I've never been a fan of black boxes that I simply trust and don't know their tradespaces, then hope for the best.
I'm not sure it's about sloppiness, some things are more complex than others. I believe IDEs are tools that allow one to handle more complexity. They have resulted in more complex software, but maybe that's because they've enabled us to write more complex software (and more of it).
Like an architect that uses CAD to create plans for a large building -- sure, they could do that with a pen on paper as well, but it would require a lot more people and a lot more time.
That can be said about languages, libraries, plugins, any tools you choose to make use of. It's just about sticking to good practices and understanding what you're using instead of choosing to be a bad dev. That shouldn't require excluding everything that has the potential to be used improperly.
> Some Projects with 40000+ files might take >5 minutes to load.
I would buy a more powerful computer. I have a project with 34908 files and IntelliJ doesn't care. Not quite 40_000+ files but still a lot :).
Also with IntelliJ I make fewer mistakes. This "thing" is just more intelligent than I am. Add "SonarLint" to the game and I sometimes don't even know _why_ I am wrong :P.
Also I think "Avoid IDE lock-in of your project" is the wrong subtitle for the following paragraph. You would have the same problems by using just a text editor.
Rd6n6 mentioned refactoring. Do that in an editor and you will go crazy after a while :).
Pro tip from an ex-performance guy: Allowing your developers to use machines more powerful than your minimum targeted device is a very good way to produce software that will not run on your maximum targeted device.
The minimum targeted device is sometimes not even capable of running the development environment. Doom was developed on $10k NeXT workstations. Good luck trying to develop Doom on a 386.
> You might think it’s obvious that you need to rename both A.f and B.f, but that’s just because this snippet is trivial.
In the general case, yes – but that's like saying “no termination analysis is possible because of the halting problem”. The IDE can safely refactor, unsafely attempt a refactor, and warn when it does the latter rather than the former.
Though I didn't know PyCharm didn't do that! That's dangerous; thanks for the warning.
When people say "no IDE" what they usually mean is the concept of an IDE turned on its head.
Your command line with vim/emacs and other tools that together arrive at the same feature set as a Integrated Development Environment are still... a development environment.
Not using an IDE doesn't mean you can't have autocomplete, syntax checking, linting, automated rebuilds, and all that other good stuff. It's just not all in one package.
And yes you shouldn't force your choice of (integrated) development environment on others. Different people have different needs: News at 11.
Maybe I’m weird, but at some point I stopped fixating on which tools to use and just settled on a personal workflow:
* terminal open at root of project used for source control
* one or more tabs for ssh/VMs etc
* IDE/VSCode/vim for editing
Any of those is fine. And sometimes I switch between them depending on my mood. If I’m out and about it can be nice to conserve battery and focus by going full terminal mode. If I have AC power and a full screen then I don’t mind an IDE as much.
One thing I insist on is doing as much work with git from the CLI. IDEs often do things like staging new files automatically that I’m not a fan of.
To the point on this one, I sometimes find myself running neovim inside the IntelliJ or VSCode terminal, when I need to edit a config file quickly while running scripts in that terminal, or just to edit a file outside the project directory. Or like you, I primarily use the git CLI, because IDEs often use to me unintuitive mappings of GUI buttons to git actions ("what does Synchronize do for git?"), so then it pops open $EDITOR to write my commit message.
When I need to create a lot of "new" code, I'll usually use nvim. When I need to edit/refactor existing code, I'll more often use atom or vscode.
I like both a lot. When bashing out code that is already reasonably clear in my head, vim works faster and with less "overhead". An ide like vscode works better for me when I need a good global search & replace, or something the ide has plugins for.
I use vim's stdin and stdout redirection to interact with git and can do things like staging or unstaging files or diff hunks and committing from within the editor.
I think the benefits of working with KISS tools - the opposite of 'everything but the kitchen sink' in Emacs parlance - is that it significantly lowers the cognitive load. This may sound odd when comparing a rather bare-bones vi + tools setup with a bells-and-whistles IDE like Visual/Android/whatever Studio but it just ends up working that way for me. I already need to keep enough state in my head for the project I'm working on so I'd rather not have to worry over the state of whatever tools I'm using.
As an aside, I feel the same about the unbridled growth of tooling around certain languages (Javascript being a prime example) and environments (Android comes to mind). Maybe it is just because of the way I started out with 8-bit assembly where a macro assembler was a luxury which could not entirely be trusted to do the right thing but I know I'm not the only one.
Agreed, I like (trying) to understand as much as I can about how my environment works so if/when something breaks I only need to learn the last 30% in a crisis, and I'm already familiar with the core. It doesn't always work, sometimes there is just too much.
It's usually useful, at least in some abstract way to the team. It felt essential when I worked alone and was accountable for everything.
> I think the benefits of working with KISS tools - the opposite of 'everything but the kitchen sink' in Emacs parlance - is that it significantly lowers the cognitive load.
No. You're wrong. Not having the right tools raises the cognitive load. You just think it's simpler because you are severely restricted in the complexity of the programs you can create with just your brain and the documentation.
IDEs expand the complexity of what you can build and make you more productive building programs of any size, because features like autocomplete and refactoring take thr cognitive burden off you.
You forgot to add "for me ...". You also implicitly defined IDEs as "the right tools". After that you imply that those who do not use "the right tools" (in your definition of "right") are "severely restricted in the complexity of the programs [they] can create".
In other words, you state that your way is the right way while my way is wrong.
Notice I did not state that my way is the right way for everyone? What makes you think yours is?
It's one of those "the mouse is objectively faster than the keyboard, no matter how much it feels otherwise" things. So much of the taxing minutiae of programming is automated away by a good IDE that, unless you're working on a very small project, the time and effort saved is worth it.
That argument can easily be turned around by adding a short phrase:
As long as you're working on a fairly standard type of project much of the taxing minutiae of programming is automated away by a good IDE that, unless you're working on a very small project, the time and effort saved is worth it.
In other words, that IDE which may assist you while you're building yet another CRUD project gets in the way when you're, say, developing a driver for a sensor on an IP camera based on a reverse-engineered example.
I feel like this is reductive and a better way of looking at the question is that for any given situation you have to figure out where to most effectively allocate your available cognitive load budget.
Sometimes, all the things the IDE lets you not think about is hugely more helpful than the additional cognitive load of modeling what the IDE itself is doing in your head.
Sometimes, having the thinnest possible layer between you and what you're running is hugely more helpful than the additional cognitive load of handling the things the IDE would've turn for you in wetware.
I was developing python/django for a couple of years in notepad++. I had a very slow computer this time and using anything else seemed way too slow. The featured I missed most from notepad++ was not being able to quickly open files for editing (ie like using ctrl+p in vscode).
Beyond that, it was a great experience. Of course, using python contributed to that great experience since most things can be easily remembered and the autocompletes are not so useful due to the dynamic nature of the language. When I needed to do Java/spring development I always fired up eclipse even if though I knew it would take 5 minutes to start and a couple of seconds for each suggestion to appear. However, trying to develop in Java without an IDE by having the javadocs open and copying and pasting all the package and class names all the time and missing everything static typing offers your is a nightmare!
In Linux, it often feels like the whole OS is the IDE. In the same shell, you can edit source files, compile, debug, execute, rename, search, create and execute scripts to do literally anything with any language, use git, surf the web, update, reboot, launch a game, etc, etc.
An IDE on top of that always felt restricting to me. Like why limit yourself? But maybe that's a windows/Mac thing.
What about refactoring tools? What about integrated debugging, stepping right into the code you're editing on your screen? What about hot reload?
If Unixheads would stop pretending their stone-knives-and-bearskins development tools were equivalent to full-fledged IDEs, development would have advanced much more than it has decades ago.
We have that to. We even have post Mortem debugging. Did you know you can load a core dump into gdb? To me it seems like a new generation of developers is reinventing the wheel because they don’t know about what tools are available.
The old unix editors have had rename across project, find references, go to definition/implementation for several years at this point via lsps (the same way vscode gets its functionality).
> What about integrated debugging
Those are usually (slightly ecosystem dependent) wrappers around a terminal debugger.
> What about hot reload?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are also wrappers around cli functionality (once again, might be ecosystem dependent). And you're probably just saving yourself the trouble of writing/running a script.
The whole "real men use vi" type superiority complex failure mode is intensely annoying (and I say this as somebody who often has original ex-vi installed) but the inverted version where you just have a superiority complex from the opposite direction isn't actually any better.
It continues to amaze me that "it's worth becoming familiar with a wide range of tools and then pick the one that's going to work best for you in any given situation" is a concept so many people have trouble with.
This is why normally I err on the side of complaining at "anti-IDE" people since my setup is way more minimalist than most of theirs so at least I'm complaining about people who're theoretically on the same side :)
The whole system is the IDE in the sense that it's meant to be an "integrated development environment".
But that's not really a good thing: you only have one system, therefore only one environment.
For example:
How do you use multiple versions of the same library for different project? It's not an easy thing to do if you rely on the system paths for libraries.
It's much better if libraries are just a thing you install to the current project rather than being a system wide thing.
I used Webstorm for years, but switched to VSCode.
It's just more flexible, which allows me to use new tech/langs very quickly.
If you don't focus on IDE features, you tend to implement quality of life improvements at a level that also works in an editor. Like in the language, framework, or library you're using (See the code generators point in the article).
With languages like Rust, that have zero cost abstractions, you don't even run into performance problems when doing so.
> I used Webstorm for years, but switched to VSCode.
> It's just more flexible, which allows me to use new tech/langs very quickly.
I'm sure you know, but Webstorm is limited by license/design. JetBrains sells editors to deal with almost every tech. I personally subscribe to the Toolbox for ~$200/yr and get all the IDEs. Some languages (like Rust) don't have a custom IDE, just a plugin into IntelliJ, the ur IDE from them.
For context, the author is a student with little real-world work experience producing software for a paycheque. To put it mildly, there’s a lot more to writing software in a modern work environment than your choice of editor or whatever.
Exactly. The youngsters like to show off their L337 hacky editor configurations. The rest of us are just getting actual work done in IntelliJ or Visual Studio.
I've used vanilla vim more or less without plugins and with a few keymap tweaks for the majority of my software development work. Every now and then I have to use an IDE to match some upstream requirements, and I much prefer using a near featureless text editor. Sure the auto-suggest, tab completion, etc. are nice, but I feel like the downsides aren't worth it. I also find it's easy to get lazy when using an IDE and produce sloppier code on the whole.
In most cases I feel that using an IDE nets you short-term, micro-productivity gains and also nets you long-term rot/maintenance headaches. imo it's typically not worth it.
There are probably other things I'm forgetting to mention.
Sure, all of these can either be cobbled together to some degree out of the fundamental individual tools. You can add plugins to Vim or Emacs to help with many of these. With enough effort you can get close to what a polished IDE offers... but you're effectively making your own quirky, fragile, non-portable inferior IDE.
Yeah, a heavy IDE is slow to start and resource hungry. But hardware is cheap, and you only start the IDE once every few days (or weeks).
When I'm on a remote server, then I'm in a shell using vim. Fine, and doable. But to really build and get things done, saving my brain for actual problem solving, I wouldn't want to give up my IDE.
Also, some of the cons on OP's list are problems with the language being developed in, not the IDE.
Why is it so important for some programmers to convince others of working the way they work?
The complaints levied at Java and Android specifically are issues I've really only seen in that language and on that platform. Excise that and all these arguments feel very flat and empty. It has not been my experience at all that using an IDE means I can't remember my project layouts, API calls, etc.
And frankly, this wreaks of the same sort of elitist arguments that only a small minority of grammarians make against spell-check. So what if the tool is a crutch? ALL TOOLS ARE! That's the point of tools, to off-load some forms of manual labor. A table saw and a fence are going to let me make straight cuts a lot quicker and easier than using a hand saw. Humanity grows and life moves on and troglodytes complain that the field is being "ruined", but what they really mean is they can't keep up.
These days I'm seeing more common support for using an IDE with an external build system. Best of both worlds... you get to have the IDE add the tedious import statements at the top of your file, and people without the IDE won't have any problems with your project.
Depending on the language and build system, this might be something I set up manually (set up an IDE project to mirror the build system), something you can set up automatically (export build system to IDE project), or there might be a standard layout for source code that mostly works.
A good ide is all about auto completion and refactoring tools. The autocompletion means you don’t have to spend as much time memorizing apis, so you can focus more on simplifying your design and minimizing coupling. In something like unreal engine, the intellisense really sets ides apart. The refactoring means you can quickly and easily make large changes to make the code easier to work in. You can just work significantly faster if you have both of these things.
I don’t really use other ide features. Separate terminals are great
I'm surprised how many of my colleagues don't use the debugging features of their IDE. Being able to step through code line by line and see all the variables states at any time and evaluate arbitrary expressions given those states seems far superior to print/console based guesstimation. However, somehow my colleagues still do great work!
Depending on which ecosystem you're working with you may be able to get those tools elsewhere. If you're working with client-side JavaScript for example, then you have multiple choices of browsers with excellent debuggers built in.
That’s still not the same as debugging within your IDE. Having to switch from the browser back to your IDE to find the files to make changes is just another context switch that slows you down. Plus, dealing with async loaded files can be a pain in the browser.
I've tried using VSCode's debugger for Javascript before. And it can be kind of nice, but ultimately on larger projects with their own build tools it can be hard to keep the sourcemaps working in such a way as to not screw up VSCode's debugger, and the gain over Firefox's built in debugger wasn't worth the effort for me to continue to maintain that config.
You can actually configure chrome to be able to edit your local files and save changes directly. Although admittedly it was a bit unreliable when I tried it.
It's a fair sight better than notepad. You get syntax highlighting, Ctrl/Cmd-P to fuzzy search for files to open, and even things like multiple cursors. But you're right that it's not quite the same experience as a full editor. You won't get linting, type checking or autocomplete.
I prefer printf debugging. a) it works everywhere, even say when the bug is only reproducible in a remote CI, or in languages that don't have good IDE support. My printf skills are top notch thanks to using it everywhere. b) the printf stuff can stay around until the next compile. I can easily vary it, put it into VCS, share it with others, etc. For IDEs such features may exist, but again I'm locked into an IDE.
Sure, in some settings the source code is not available and you still want to debug. Then I use debuggers. But outside of that I prefer printf debugging.
Note that I'm not saying that people who prefer debuggers are wrong. They probably have their reasons, as I have. Everyone should be allowed to use the method they prefer the most.
So far as I can tell from having worked with lots of people with lots of different preferences, there is basically no correlation between preferences in debugging approaches and ability/productivity.
I do however really wish the world made it easier to help turn both state introspection via interactive debugger and state introspection via printf shotgun into structured trace-level logging that could be shared and/or committed to the codebase independent of the original debugging tool used.
Yes this. Distributed tracing is making these concepts more popular but in many cases it requires manual instrumentation of every function call and state one wants to track. I would love to see more auto-instrumentation but seems this should be implemented at the interpreter or compiler level.
Using this right now to break apart a 5k line file. Being able to see the call hierarchy of all the functions allows me to move over functions with less dependencies and slowly work towards the ones that are heavily intertwined. I can see it all at a glance without having to jump from one function to another over and over.
Refactoring is where it's at for me. The ability to rename functions and variables across not just a local file, but all references in the code base is huge.
Relatedly, the ability to find all usages of a symbol and navigate between them is indispensable for me at this point.
> Relatedly, the ability to find all usages of a symbol and navigate between them is indispensable for me at this point.
I don't know if people just aren't aware, but vi and emacs have been doing this since at least the 90s. This isn't some fancy feature that requires an IDE. Recently the support has improved even more through LSP.
> I don't know if people just aren't aware, but vi and emacs have been doing this since at least the 90s. This isn't some fancy feature that requires an IDE. Recently the support has improved even more through LSP.
No, rtags & friends aren't remotely comparable to an IDE which has a semantic understanding of the code, and will catch the uses without false positives.
LSP gives you exactly the same functionality though, since it's what VS Code is also using.
Whether the implementation is prone to false positives (it really shouldn't be) is up the server, not the client (e.g. vim or VS Code). The client actually doesn't have 'a semantic understanding of the code' - that's the point of it, not needing every editor to implement an understanding of every language it wants to support.
I mean, I think they are? Sure jumping to a generic definition like getId will give you more choices, but i know which one i want. Having to push space and then 9 to get the second page and choose the one i want isn't the end of the world.
Recently LSP provides exactly what you desire anyways with context sensitive jumps.
Edit: Regardless, perhaps our difference here lies around what the minimum specification is. My reading of this thread and the post i responded to is that people think moving around in code without an IDE means closing one file, navigating to the next file and opening that one. This is patently not how it works, and what i was adressing.
> I mean, I think they are? Sure jumping to a generic definition like getId will give you more choices, but i know which one i want. Having to push space and then 9 to get the second page and choose the one i want isn't the end of the world.
I often do codebase-wide renamings. I would definitely lose a lot of time if I had to check every single instance of "getId" as you say (to give more precise figures, if I want to rename an "id" I get ~2000 matches). With my IDE I can just ctrl-shift-r and rename any symbol and it works without me having to think about it.
> Recently LSP provides exactly what you desire anyways with context sensitive jumps.
that's likely implementation issues but LSP for C++ in 2021 is definitely not as good & integrated as e.g. native clang integration for parsing.
> I don't know if people just aren't aware, but vi and emacs have been doing this since at least the 90s. This isn't some fancy feature that requires an IDE. Recently the support has improved even more through LSP.
We know about them. When you start adding these scripts to vi and Emacs they're no longer in the realm of plain text editors. You can add a bunch of hacks to turn vi or Emacs into a poor mans IDE.
Error detection is a big one too. My code in an interpreted language wouldn’t error until this corner case hit, but my IDE tells me the issue as soon as I write it. It’s a huge boost.
As the author points out, it does depend on the language. I switched to vim "full-time" when moving to a Go team. (Prev Java).
Java is a language that does not lend itself to vim. Even just compiling and running a sufficiently large java program can be a pain without an IDE setup.
Same. I would very much like to use a text editor full-time given how strapped for resources my machine is, but I work on either Java or Angular 90% of the time. The productivity loss is too much to deal with, and the solution is to add a bizarre number of plugins to the editor to the point that it becomes somewhat of an IDE itself, without the guarantee that the plugins will interact well with each other.
None of these feel particularly true to me, but in particular "less code is more readable" is just so clearly not true. If this was the case we'd all still be using Perl.
I see some truth to this, under a more reasonable interpretation. Clearly, well-golfed k/j/q/apl isn't doing the reader any favors. On the other hand, unnecessarily verbose code can be just as tortuous as unnecessarily terse code. And when you're comparing apples to apples (e.g. same algorithm, same data structures), shorter code is somewhat correlated to better performance.
In terms of developer productivity, less code faster to write and faster to read. To a point. The sweet spot is the shortest code that's still easy to read & write.
However "less conceptually complex code is often easier to reason about' is absolutely true and it takes most people a fair amount of practice (and at least if you're me, a lot of wondering why your foot suddenly has a hole in it) to properly appreciate the difference between "less conceptually complex" and "less".
The downside is losing access to refactoring, auto-fixes, integrated debuggers, auto complete, countless plugins, etc. Some of that stuff is nice & helpful. Some of it stops you from doing silly things. And some of it automates the detection and fixing of problems you would otherwise introduce without realizing. The latter is why it's important to use proper tools. Because introducing such preventable issues to any code base is just really not excusable for a professional software developer.
Of course, tooling is better for some languages than for others. But even the ones you think are not that well supported actually do have some nice IDEs these days. Worth checking out such tools. Of course you can compensate with discipline and use command line build tools to tell you what's wrong and then manually look up the code location and fix all the issues .... or you could just autofix the warning in your IDE and move on to dealing with more interesting problems.
As a good friend used to tell me, laziness is a sign of intelligence. In IDE terms, if you spend half an hour manually fixing something that a tool could have fixed for you in seconds, you are being an idiot. Or alternatively, if you can't be bothered to understand and use the command line tools available to you, do consider using an IDE as it will save you some time mastering those tools you clearly can't be bothered with mastering. It's the intelligent choice.
I started with Q-Basic about 30 years ago, which came with an IDE which was as powerful as Textedit or Nano. No auto-completion, no refactoring, nothing. Then came Delphi, MS Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Eclipse, IntelliJ/AppCode/Android Studio, Xcode, Visual Studio Code - all in that order.
I came to realize that the more the IDE did for me the worse I became as a programmer!
Today I’m back to plain text editing with a powerful text manipulation tool - (Neo)Vim.
And I program like back in the 90s — I have all file names, methods, the complete code structure of _all_ products and services of our company on my mind. I can see the final solution in my mind before I start typing a single letter. Refactoring is done with regex, it works the same in all programming languages. I work full stack. And I’m really fast. And I’m not tired by having all code and APIs in my mind. Because programming is pure joy again for me. Pure text editing is what makes me fast and having tons of fun. I ship so fast and things very rarely break. Bugs are fixed within minutes because I see the root causes flashing up in my mind.
To me IDEs are for intermediate programmers. It’s a good thing to temporarily improve your skills but I don’t see them as a means to achieve mastery, at least not for the mastery that I could achieve.
I don’t use an IDE but I use emacs. Heavily use Helm, heavily use its ag integration to navigate around projects and I yasnippet useful patterns and rely on them a lot. Am I using an “IDE” - no. But am I using tooling to make my life way easier than a raw text editor? Absolutely. Will my productivity fall off rapidly without this tooling? Most likely.
So I reject the argument made in the article. Just choose your IDE wisely and make the tradeoffs you want to be productive.
> When you have to manually find a file to change a subroutine implementation, or to refactor a subroutine, you will have good file names and a good directory structure. The Antipattern of the directory layout of your typical Java Enterprise Project is a Testament to this. (src/main/java/org/company/product/...)
To play devil’s advocate, isn’t the goal of a good IDE to abstract away the actual filesystem organization of the code? As long as I can quickly look up function definitions via the IDE, I don’t care how they’re actually organized on disk. As an analogy, I’m sure my Gmail inbox is internally stored across multiple different databases and would be a nightmare to manually browse at the database level, but I don’t care because I can easily access all my messages through my email client or the web UI.
Disclaimer: I’m not an IDE user myself (simply because I’m oldschool, have all the emacs keybindings burned into my muscle memory, and I’ve never taken the time to learn one well), and in principle agree with the author’s point. IDEs are not (yet) at a point where they’ve rendered the filesystem completely irrelevant, although some are getting pretty close.
I may be talking out of my ass, as I've never used it, but this is my impression of most smalltalk environments, that they just expose objects and functions, not files. For example: https://pharo.org/features.html under "Software as objects"
None of this matters in the slightest as soon as you have to work with other people on stuff. At that point common tooling is more important than specific personalised tooling.
If everyone is using IntelliJ and you're using Atom, it's going to be problematic. Not because of either of those tools, but because you now have a discrepancy that is not relevant to the work you're doing yet it's creating problems for the work you're doing. Adding friction like that doesn't help anyone.
"Works on my machine" doesn't just apply to the artifacts you build, it also applies to the way you work on your project.
Of course there is some difference between multiple people editing random plain text in a random editor and multiple people building a piece of software with a toolchain, deployment strategy, tests etc. If everyone in your team can scaffold the tests in 1 second because that's what the IDE does, and you're the only one that has to burn half a day on manually stubbing out the same scaffolding, you're the problem.
This has nothing to do with CI/CD or forcing anything on anyone. It has to do with being similar enough in a team to be able to work together. Being unique or different to a degree that it is hurting your (and by extension your team's) performance is bad.
Not OP. But having to sit for an hour watching some Vscode dev struggling to run tests or get auto complete on some random function is a waste of time. They spend more time faffing about fixing and fiddling with that than it would take to install a proper IDE and load up the same project and have it 100% work.
Like I get it, some people know their language inside and out and can fix it in a second because they know all the pitfalls and inner workings of the tool chain. But 99.5% of them don't, yet when they fix it they act like code ninja messiahs because they configured some random json config file after googling it and it worked. That's all I see Vscode users doing.
Against though that sound like more of the same argument. If you set up external tooling to run the tests you can just tell them to use that with nothing to set up.
Either way whatever tool you use, nothing can be worse than pairing with someone who copies and pastes with a mouse.
I can just feel my life ebbing away as my inner voice screams “LEARN THE SHORTCUTS” and they slowly move 3 characters across the screen, make a mistake and try again. :P
I mentioned that because in 2005 that was a real PITA and the first example that came to me. It's not a 'real' problem in Greenfield problems today. It also isn't really the point, but just an example for people who don't get the point (and apparently not a good one at that).
The point was: if you make it difficult to work together because you have a high horse / hill to die on / unique incompatibility, it makes teamwork unreasonably hard and inefficient, which becomes a problem as soon as time and/or money is involved. The "haha I am so much better because I don't use an IDE" line of thought falls within that category. So does "I run TempleOS so that my code is blessed" and "I don't like git so I use TFS and you can all suck it".
Now, say you have something much easier to not care about tools; i.e. a gitops driven workflow for your terraform code. Then it doesn't really matter what you have locally because until your code is merged it is in no way/shape/form going to create a problem. On the other hand, if you refused to use efficient tooling your performance might be half of what other people might present and that means the people that pay you don't get a good value from your work. Efficient tooling might mean: something that understands the syntax or AST of what you write and points out errors so you don't find out after the fact.
There are some things that I feel that IDEs do better than a terminal or editor:
- Running tests (test running requires juggling a hierarchy of tests, their results, their declarations, plus with an IDE you can run tests directly from the test declaration)
- Lint / Static analysis (you get the warnings automatically as you code)
- Debugging (it's easier to watch several things at once, easier to inspect a complex object, you can inspect through a tooltip when hovering over a variable on the code)
I really don't care about how anyone prefers to work, but I fear that anti-IDE people in many cases don't even debug (except by printing), lint or test... which I DO care about, if I have to work with them. These things are about being a responsible coder.
I could also add that the "Local history" feature of Jetbrains IDEs can save code from accidental deletion, which is another thing that goes beyond personal preferences.
I have no need to do any of this locally outside of debugging when I can commit/push early/often and get the same feedback from my CI/CD process. It also solves the "local history" problem because my code lives on a remote. If anything what you're describing sounds like a lack of standardization or gates in order for code to reach production. That's an engineering problem, not an IDE vs text editor issue.
My point was that an IDE runs the static analysis in the background and gives feedback as soon as you type, in the editor itself, instead of having a separate step.
Same with the test... it's easier to react to the test result, check what's failing, re-run the test directly from the IDE.
This would be in addition to the CI/CD... to aid the coder, not just to secure the integrity of the codebase.
The "local history" feature is not just undo... it can also recover deleted files. I could be wrong but I assume vi doesn't do that. I'd also argue that it's friendlier (surely not faster) to navigate if you need to find the exact point at which you made your mistake.
I know that some editors have a lot of advanced features / plugins for coding. I still think a lot of people prefer editors over IDEs because they don't debug, or lint, or test... not because they're terminal wizards that are slowed down by any sort of GUI.
He bashes VS Code at the end but that seems exactly what he wants. VS Code is more of a text editor then an IDE, and you can turn off all the “issues” he complains about.
Man, I've been going back to full-fat VS after working in VS Code for a while, and boy, does VS just chug even opening a "Hello World" C# project.
(I used VS at work regularly and the performance on a million-SLoC solution was quite bad, but I didn't expect it to be much better given the size of the solution)
If I am the main developer on a three year project, I use whatever editor, command-line tools and custom scripts I need to get the job done. The whole project, from code to ops, architecture, security and documentation, is in my head.
However, if I'm thrown in half-finished projects as consultant, the tooling in IDEs can help me to get a grasp on what needs to get done without necessarily having to construct the whole map inside my head. Whether this approach leads to better code is highly dubious, but one doesn't always get to pick outside factors.
These are just tools, each with their own purpose, benefits and weak points. The main criticisms of IDEs seem based on a certain type of developer that does not know the world outside of their favourite IDE and programming language, which of course is not a problem of the tool itself.
The difference between an IDE and a souped-up vim or emacs configuration is ... very little. Your average fancy pants vim config has auto-completion, debuggers, etc.
I think this is not wrong. When you are using the better quality IDEs (for example C# with Visual Studio, or Java with IntelliJ), they offer you a lot this isn't there in Emacs or VIM.
I currently mostly work in Python using Emacs, because I don't know of anything that adds really compelling full-blown IDE features for a dynamically typed language.
I will also say that Datagrip and Microsoft SQL Server Studio are both way ahead of any Emacs SQL packages I've tried.
Yes, I agree. Conditional on some "difficult" languages like Java, the experience is quite different. For non-difficult languages like C, R, and Python, the gap is small.
With JetBrains PyCharm or the PyCharm plugin in IntelliJ, you can treat all python3 as statically typed ... use the type-annotations and then linter will catch your mistakes.
1. Optional: do install of neovim
2. git pull dotfiles
3. cd dotfiles
4. install.sh
5. Profit $$$
Sure, there's some initial setup time but I'm not seeing how its orders of magnitude faster unless your vim config is super bloated and/or has a lot of external dependencies.
Yeah. For my vim I need fd, fzf and rg. So my dotfiles repo also has an install script. I never had the patience to setup lsp correctly. Maybe I’ll try again with all lua neovim plug-ins and config.
This is the equivalent of never washing your hands to build up immunity. You're just spending more time and energy to solve a problem that the tool can solve for you.
Are you more independent for it? Sure, I guess. But I'd rather be efficient then get brownie points
I write very different code when not using an IDE.
If I’m not using an IDE, my code has to be contextually simpler for me to remember it (because I can’t just jump to definition) which makes my code ultimately better organized. However, I assume this comes at some speed penalty, at least in the short term.
For personal projects I don’t use an IDE, but for work because everyone else writes IDE-style code, I also need to use an IDE to wrangle it.
I guess it depends on your definition of an IDE, and where you're most comfortable/productive. I see a lot of posts about autocomplete, refactoring, linting, tooltips, tests-by-cursor/file, snippets. Thanks to a very friendly plugin community, you can get all of these in vim, emacs etc. I like vim, and it has nothing to do with hubris.
For me it's mostly about:
1. proximity to the terminal: I find cli tools very useful for most of my daily tasks. Using an editor puts the terminal first, and my editor second. One-off tasks are a tmux split/tab/session away and everything is neatly organized.
2. consistent interface: Working with a terminal is neat because everything is text and it is composable.
Working in vim, all menus are just buffers - you can navigate them the same way as you would your code. Searching, navigation, jumping between windows/menus, filtering -- everything stays consistent.
3. quick n' dirty workflows: If I identify a task-specific workflow I want to improve in vim, it is pretty easy to drop in functions and/or keybindings to do what I want. The interface was built in a way that makes this easy. Writing a plugin for visualstudio, or jetbrains etc. requires knowing a lot more about the editor you're working in and how it's built. Maybe it just feels that way to me.
4. 0% adjustment when working over SSH: tabs, splits, etc. both in my editor and terminal are identical in an SSH session. No discomfort. Mostly useful at home.
5. low distraction: This one's personal. IDEs are intimidating, hundreds of buttons, menus, logs prompts all fighting for your attention. If I click through a deeply nested menu I often forget what I'm doing - especially if there is a fire. Functions and Muscle memory works for me. It clearly does not work for everyone.
> Thanks to a very friendly plugin community, you can get all of these in vim, emacs etc. I like vim, and it has nothing to do with hubris.
> 0% adjustment when working over SSH: tabs, splits, etc. both in my editor and terminal are identical in an SSH session. No discomfort. Mostly useful at home.
Aren't these two benefits mutually exclusive? If you're got a very personalised vim setup, then vim on your workstation is going to be potentially dramatically different to vim when sshed into a remote machine
That's a good point!
If you have your own user account you could dump your .vimrc on there.. but maybe you don't want a lot of vim plugins on a server.
Now that vscode has a plugin that uses your local setup to edit files over SSH, my argument is a lot less compelling. Even at home, I have a lesser vimrc I provision to servers - I found it hard to justify installing treesitter, linters, etc. on a server where I'm mostly dealing with json/yaml/shellscript.
To be clear, this comment is about IDEs for common languages where they are a viable and general consideration as the topic is about IDEs as a whole. Platforms and/or languages where IDEs are commonly known as limited/awful, with no alternatives, are a moot point and not the root of the topic's points.
The points made and most of these comments are a joke. Basically bad practice and poor use of source control is being blamed on IDEs. Anyone with these problems (in modern times, old projects/approaches are products of their time) simply isn't a competent dev and/or never studied. I don't even recall any of these things being an issue in the first months of learning to code, 10 years ago.
To be a good programmer, don't learn from bad sources and don't be overly lazy to the point you develop bad habits. You can do all of that while still using an IDE. How you use the tools available is on you, not on the tools.
If a tool is so bad it enforces bad practice and has no way to avoid complicating workflow, find a better alternative. A tool is meant to streamline and improve workflow, not hinder it. I've never chosen to use an IDE that has enforced any of the issues being commented on, as if the only alternative is avoiding IDEs outright. I choose to use IDEs that are best-suited for the language I am using, are flexible and allow me to work how I like without convoluting my workflow. I also never commit IDE or user-specific files to a repository as that's just awful practice.
I'm also yet to read a complaint in comments here that claims to be a specific IDE forcing or creating problems that isn't actually about a company/team that has created a terrible dev ecosystem (or backing off an archaic one) for a project that they restricted and boxed into an IDE. Just because poor project management can make a project a nightmare to work with doesn't make the tools involved the problem.
> By not using an IDE, you have to remember the syntax
> because there is just so much, that it becomes impractical to remember
I got more comfortable and faster with large projects when I stopped caring about remembering and switched to search & find. I'm always amused seeing someone trying to navigate a directory tree of 2000 files.
When I first started my career, I used vi (not even vim) on Solaris terminals to develop and learn Perl, which I still know and love 20+ years later. I believe that I never would have learned it so deeply if I had used an IDE with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and the other various nanny features. That said, my life would be a whole lot more difficult if not for modern IDEs (which I currently use for Java, TypeScript, Clojure, Ruby, etc.), and at this point in my career, I can’t see myself going back to bare-bones editors. However, I have started using VSCode more often (when it makes sense to do so) - this seems to be a good compromise between a full-fledged IDE and a plain text editor, although you could certainly configure VSCode in such a way that it is basically an IDE.
One of my personal role models, https://github.com/Gabriel439/, uses mostly vanilla Vim. Maybe they'd be 10x as productive with an IDE, but I doubt it. And in any case, the difference in quality and output between them and me is certainly not the tools.
I don't think the tooling matters at all, unless you work in a very specific field where certain tools may be mandatory.
Whether you look up APIs in documentation or read that same documentation in your editor, who cares? Seeing red squiggles as you type or in a terminal window that refreshes on change? Who cares. It wouldn't even make a difference if you only saw errors when manually starting compilation.
“IDEs considered harmful”. That's exactly the thesis of Nicholas Carr's book, “The Glass Cage”. He claims the more we employ cognitive-enhancing tools like IDEs to help us perform tasks that require mental effort, the less engaged we become, the less creative, and the less effort we're willing to apply in tackling other kinds of mental tasks. In short, “flow” stops when we disengage and let automation to do the job for us.
"Not using an IDE" can mean very different things depending on how you define "editor".
I would say that an editor that INTEGRATES knowledge of your source in some way, like auto-complete, or red-squiggles, is very much a big step towards an IDE and should could as "using an IDE". Whether it does that using plug-ins/extensions or natively doesn't matter. If it has that functionality there's not that much more separating it from an IDE.
VSCode, for example, is more like an IDE than an editor especially as you add more and more extensions.
I always take this kind of opinions with a grain of salt but I also don't like bloated IDEs, like the author.
But it's a general and trivial comparison. Like using MS word vs markdown, or Ubuntu vs Arch or Alpine.
It all comes down to your use case and it's not black and white. My Swiss knife is VS Code, arguably an IDE-minus, or an editor-plus. And given that I work all day on software it happens that I occasionally go down (vim) or up (XCode, Visual Studio, Android Studio) and I have no problem with that.
Switching between languages frequently, VS Code is great. Other IDEs are better for specific languages/contexts.
However, I credit my understanding to the time I spent in Notepad++ and times I explored code on the whiteboard while reading docs. Thus, I feel my "internal compiler" would not be anywhere as useful if I had always relied on productivity tools (IDEs).
That said, my input isn't maximized by more efficiently producing the same thing, like a factory, in which case I say IDE all the way.
In the early days of IDEs (1990s) there were projects where I spent more time trying to figure out the IDE than I did on the project code! Same goes for many frameworks. Just when you get competent, the IDE/framework changes. AFter a few generations, informal standards developed in IDE functionality so it was easier to switch. But still by far the most powerful tool I know that I only had to learn once is the Unix pipeline.
> The Antipattern of the directory layout of your typical Java Enterprise Project is a Testament to this. (src/main/java/org/company/product/...)
My eye twitched when I read this. My company recently switched to a new build system and for whatever reason this required (I guess??) a change to the src/main/java... structure. The commit history going back over a decade, gone. It's not great.
I've spent my entire career avoiding IDEs, and now VS Code has finally sucked me into what I'm increasingly suspicious is an IDE cunningly disguised as a text editor.
I use it to edit random text files full of notes too, because I trust it to bring back my unsaved work if my laptop crashes.
Everybody I know that uses VIM and VS Code uses them with a bunch of plugins to make them more IDE-like. The result will still probably be more performant than a true IDE, but the downside is there is additional setup time and brittleness. The JetBrains IDEs, at least the ones I've used, just work.
I've yo-yo'd between minimalist setups and full blown IDEs over the years.
Nowadays I'm happy with IntelliJ for Go development and a little bit of Rust. There's something quite freeing from not having to tinker much with configs and just get on with actual work!
Admittedly I do use the terminal feature in IntelliJ quite extensively so I'm not making full use of the features, but meh.
The JetBrains IDE family is half way there. You can run your code on remote targets now, but I think the code itself still has to actually be on your machine.
one trauma from eclipse days, is that for instance, libs thus classpath management was left to eclipse devs .. and I had no idea what was going on, why it worked, what differences between the options ..
when I could write a makefile to finally jar / launch a java app on my own, I felt such a relief..
> By not using an IDE, you have to remember the syntax of the language you are using, the subroutines from your own project and their arguments. You also remember (standard-)library subroutines better for your chose programming language.
Use an IDE, and discover + learn the syntax by being assisted. Start biking on a unicycle, and fail.
> When you have to manually find a file to change a subroutine implementation, or to refactor a subroutine, you will have good file names and a good directory structure. The Antipattern of the directory layout of your typical Java Enterprise Project is a Testament to this. (src/main/java/org/company/product/...)
There were no IDEs for Java when it started. And it immensely structured everything. Not having an IDE doesn't mean anything about naming.
> With big projects, it might slow you down to have the IDE load the entire project before you can start working. Some Projects with 40000+ files might take >5 minutes to load.
But in return you'll get something that will tell you what's going on, or even do hot code swaps, saving you a lot more than those 5 min.
> This is almost always the result of bad language design and/or bad library design. An example is developing android apps in Java with Android studio. Here, you will be slowed down a great deal in order to program without Android Studio. There will be a steep learning curve.
The IDE does more than just edit code. Welcome to different resolutions, devices, etc. Please tell me you'd rather have the device mess of J2ME // Symbian.
> Good Open Source Projects encourage people to clone, fork, and maybe even to contribute to a Project. People are able to directly edit files on github, if an IDE is not required and they know the language being used. Not requiring an IDE makes it easier for blind people, who might be using screenreaders to understand your project, and enables people without modern hardware (which might be unable/impractical to run an IDE) to work on your project.
IDEs have makefiles / build.xml / whatever. You're totally uninformed
> Have you ever seen a Java Enterprise Project? Sometimes the Java classes in there have 20+ import statements, automatically generated by the IDE. Working in this style, with such long package names and lots of classes/namespaces eventually almost forces you to use an IDE because there is just so much, that it becomes impractical to remember.
All Java IDEs support maven or whatever is popular right now.
> Not having Autocomplete / Code Generation guides you naturally to writing more compact and idiomatic Code in the Language of your Choice. It helps you to learn language-specific features and syntactic sugar.
That's a language design issue.
In Java, there is the Concept of Getters, Setters, toString, hashCode and so on. These methods can be auto-generated by the IDE.
In practise, this leads to bloat. The IDE is simply compensating for missing language features (built-in hashing of a composite data type, built-in string representation ).
Java fields themselves, along with their setters and getters, are entry points in which to control via annotations whether properties are read-only, write-only, or read/write in multiple contexts (e.g. Spring Configuration, JSON de/serialization), how they're serialized in JSON (serialized type can be different, field name can be adjusted), field ordering, and human readability.
Just thinking setters and getters set and get the property is naive and retrograde.
Agreed. And, also, who cares? Yes, Java is a mediocre language and way too verbose. I spend a bunch of time in Java and I don't notice the worst of that because I (like literally every Java dev I know) use an IDE. You shouldn't separate a language from the standard tooling it comes with/enables - they're intertwined.
> simply listing Reasons, The Antipattern of the directory layout of your typical Java Enterprise Project is a Testament to this., contribute to a Project, idiomatic Code in the Language of your Choice.
thanks for your genuine post. I can't help but notice the big red disclaimer you put on the beginning.
Once I wrote a blog post about a thing I didn't like about Typescript and submitted it to Hacker News [1]. Bad choice. The hate was immense and unnecessary. I even had one guy write a long post about what a "soy dev" I am. That made me feel sad and dislike the HN and dev community.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your blog post and that I think you've made some good points. Thanks!
One thing that makes a big difference for me when programming in the terminal is the `fish` shell. It just has really good autocomplete.
Also check out the `micro` editor.
I don't find any of that person's arguments particularly compelling, especially this one:
> Respect the Unix Philosophy
I have no respect for the unix philosophy.
They go on to clarify:
> (Visual Studio's poor man's autocomplete is a prime example)
And so from this I deduce that the author considers autocomplete to NOT be part of the "one thing" that an editor, under the Unix Philosophy, is supposed to do. But both emacs and vim have autocomplete capability, so either autocomplete in an editor is only philosophically acceptable if it's good enough, or emacs and vim are not worthy of the Philosophy.
I can understand people using text editors (a la Vim, Emacs) if they've been using them for donkeys years and are extremely proficient and productive with them, additionally for making quick changes to files from the terminal.
However, why any developer would reach for one of these tools now when working on application development is beyond me (other than to feel like a 1337 OG hax0r of course)
I'm on my way back to doom emacs after a year using intellij + ideavim.
I get 90% of the features with LSP. Faster performance. Magit. Extreme configurability. It's easier to write a quick function in elisp and have it at my fingertips at anytime. (ie. M-x my/do-repetitive-thing)
I know it's a personal anecdote, but 100% of the devs I've worked with who refused to use an IDE ranged from below average to flat out bad at software development.
So, we are talking about tools. First
some generalities:
We can expect that considering tools has
to be complicated, e.g., apparently the
rise of civilization involved the
development of many tools for many
purposes.
Closer to Hacker News, there is a LOT of
data. The explosion in
price/performance of computing and digital
communications has the amount and variety
of data growing. So, handling data can be
a challenge, and picking tools can also be
a challenge.
For handling data, there are some
tools/data types, e.g., SQL, IDEs, Word,
TeX, Aspell spelling checker, the old file
search utility grep, HTML, JPG, comma
separated values (CSV), spreadsheets, ....
Of course, if concentrate on one source of
data for a few narrow purposes, then can
have some specialized tools that were
expensive to develop and needed training
to learn to use but with a lot of usage
can be very productive. Maybe a good
analogy is the factory that produces the
cans of beef ravioli that I eat sometimes
for a fast meal -- no doubt they prepare
ravioli by the square mile, and I doubt
that they use a rolling pin!
Then there are people; they tend to be
different: Some of these people work in a
gold/copper mine, coal mine, on a huge
fishing trawler that goes from catching
the fish to having them frozen in retail
packages, ..., down to changing the air
filter in the family car once a year,
getting the garage door back on track
about each two years, cleaning up after
the kittens have accidents, .... Some of
this work uses big, expensive, specialized
tools, and some uses just simple, old,
general purpose tools, hammers, pliers,
screwdrivers, maybe Vise Grips, a 1/4"
electric drill, etc.
So, to give some evidence of case n = 1,
me, and in computing, I use various tools.
Examples include Google, Wikipedia,
YouTube.
But for what I do on my PC where Google,
etc., doesn't help, I settled on a broad
strategy: As much as I reasonably and
efficiently can, stay with text, standard
ASCII (maybe more accurately with some UTF
definition) text. Then to manipulate this
text, use my favorite text editor, KEDIT.
I can customize this editor using its
macro language, Kexx, a version of the M.
Cowlishaw Rexx. Rexx is no toy -- before
internets or the Internet, IBM had
something similar in their internal
computing, and a lot of it was run by
servers written in Rexx. Currently I have
something over 250 Kexx macros for KEDIT.
So, where I make use of KEDIT directly?
(a) Since some of my most important
writing is pure/applied math, I've had to
get good with D. Knuth's math word
processing TeX -- I've written about 100
macros in TeX. So, I use KEDIT with its
macros to type in documents in TeX with my
TeX macros. Now that I'm good with TeX,
it is also my favorite word processing for
letters, business cards, and more.
(b) For remembering URLs, phone numbers,
mailing addresses, other little items of
information, I have a very simple little
system based on KEDIT and a few, simple
macros. All the data is in one file of,
currently, 3,368,455 bytes. Currently I
have 5947 such entries starting in
September, 2005 and more in other files
going back some decades. With the 5947
entries and 3,368,455 bytes, that is an
average of
3,368,455 / 5947 = 566
bytes per entry.
Since
5947 / 16 = 371
on average I add an item to this file
about once a day.
KEDIT makes it fast and easy to count the
number of entries.
(c) In a file I maintain with KEDIT, I
keep medical, diet, exercise, etc.
history. I have some macros I use to
extract data to read in with Excel and
draw graphs.
That Excel will read in data from just
simple text files is terrific.
(d) Mostly KEDIT is good for editing files
one or a few
at a time, but I use the Windows file
system as a taxonomic hierarchy for
organizing the files. Then I have a
little program in Rexx that puts the data
describing
a file system subtree in a text
file with several columns of fixed widths
and use
KEDIT to sort, search, select that
content.
(e) One of my favorite macros is IDC,
insert dated comment, e.g.,
Modified at 13:24:42 on Saturday,
August 21st, 2021.
So, with IDC I can slap time/date stamps
on content and do so many times a day.
Yes, the little macro reads the file type
and puts in appropriate comment
delimiters.
Just these time/date stamps are a good,
fast, single way to provide first-cut
documentation of work -- that months or
years later are great to have if don't
have anything else.
(f) I wrote a little KEDIT macro calc,
abbreviates calculate to evaluate simple
numerical expressions. E.g., at one point
in my career my manager believed that a
disk drive of 100 million bytes was
large, much larger than necessary. At
Amazon I just ordered an external hard
disk drive with 5 trillion bytes. So,
using calc, we can find the ratio
(5 * 10*12)/(100 * 10*6) = 50,000
(g) So I write code in Rexx, Kexx, TeX, C
(occasionally), and Microsoft's .NET. And
now that I'm good with KEDIT, I use it to
write all this code. In .NET, with a
little C, for my startup I typed in code
in 100,000 lines of typing with 24,000
programming language statements. So,
about 75% of the lines are documentation
for me to understand the code! Some random
exogenous events pulled me away from that
code, but I will be back to it soon, and
then the comments will be very welcome,
get me back to 100% in understanding all
the code.
Most of the comments have tree names on my
development computer of, usually, HTML
files of .NET or other documentation, and,
sure, I have a macro that helps with that.
E.g., with one keystroke, Firefox will
display a file of HTML documentation.
The comments are essentially just text,
technical writing, and KEDIT with its
formatting is good for that. Also my
standard spell checker, Aspell, works with
that text. That is, the code is, to KEDIT
and Aspell, just text.
(h) Sure, I use KEDIT to write email and
often to read email. I went for some
years using some code I wrote in Rexx for
email -- then email got more complicated
and I had to use Outlook or now what my
ISP provides (I intend to return to
Outlook). But when I write email, I still
use KEDIT. When I receive email that is
just simple text, I use KEDIT to format
(flow it) and read it.
(i) Sometimes I still want to print some
things, e.g., shopping lists, envelopes,
etc., and use KEDIT for that.
I'm numbering, labeling, my external hard
disk drives with PASSPORTnnn sequentially
with integers nnn, and I print these with
KEDIT.
(j) Sure, eating is necessary, and I cook
my own food. For that, I develop recipes
and use KEDIT to create those. To take a
recipe to the kitchen, I can print via
KEDIT.
(k) Sometimes URLs have hex characters.
So, I have a little KEDIT macro to convert
those URLs back to just text.
(l) And, sure, I'm using KEDIT for typing
this Hacker News post.
So, as in these examples, (a) -- (l), as
much as I can I use just simple text files
maintained with KEDIT. Then I get good
with KEDIT, macros, muscle memory, etc.
and use that skill as much as I can.
I can't use KEDIT for everything, so
sometimes I use other tools.
Once I tried to use Microsoft's Visual
Studio. I didn't like the documentation
but charged ahead. I created a project,
and before I had typed in any code I
looked and saw a directory subtree with
maybe, IIRC, 50 files I knew nothing
about. I stopped right there. Maybe
someday I will see need to use an IDE,
maybe Visual Studio, and will return to
it.
All the programming I do is in languages
where the code is in just simple text
files. To me that use of simple text is
terrific, and I take advantage of it.
So, net, I use KEDIT and simple text files
for dozens of varieties of work; in
principle each variety, done with enough
volume, could be done with more
productivity with a specialized tool, but
for just my work, where I use KEDIT and
text files, none of the varieties are
worth the investment, overhead, of a
specialized tool.
By analogy, to me KEDIT is like a Swiss
Army knife with 15 tools including a can
opener. If I opened enough cans, I might
want some restaurant kitchen $500 counter
top electric can opener, but for me, now,
the Swiss Army Knife is better.
This is truly a HackerNews moment. IDEs bring optional usefull stuff you can ignore if you want. Yet here in comments we have autists arguing that using IDEs (=option stuff you can ignore) is bad vs using their favourite 40 year old text editor in terminal. Jesus christ you people are funny.
If you're no using an IDE, you're not working in big enough codebases or are not required to move fast enough - either way, I'm not really interested what you have to say. After you work in this business for over a decade, you'll know dumb ideas just because you've seen them several times before. "No IDE" is just that. A dumb idea.
Using an IDE is like playing the piano and putting stickers with the name of each note. There's no objective downside to doing this, but it's not really going to help you play better music once you go beyond the very basic stuff. It may give some people a false sense of security, but it won't make a difference to a professional programmer. Some of those programmers (but not all, and that is OK) will become annoyed at the stickers once they know how to play the instrument.
I'm not sure the piano analogy is really apt. A piano has 88 keys (and really it's just the same keys repeated across multiple octaves) so any competent player will of course quickly memorize the keys and playing the piano would be impossible by actually reading the labels on the key anyway.
Doing software development means using a variety of different standard APIs which many combinations of methods/parameters/etc as well as any number of custom, project-specific APIs. Sure, if you work on the same project using the same codebase for years on end then you can probably effectively memorize all the relevant APIs, but few developers are in that situation. You move from project to project and have to drop in to large, existing codebases with their own conventions and abstractions.
Always use an IDE for significant software projects. Maybe not for small scripts, or for faffing about on your own learning to code Charles Petzold style. But for professionals working on production code, artificially restricting your productivity by denying yourself the time- and effort-saving features of a good IDE is tantamount to goldbricking.
Counterargument: Artificially restricting your productivity by denying yourself the features of a high-functioning daily-driver editor and CLI git+make and replacing them with a low quality IDE that lacks useful features and the features in it don't work very well anyway is tantamount to goldbricking.
This is very common in embedded systems.
I ditched one such IDE in a project a couple of years ago and switched to Emacs + git + make + command line compilers. The productivity improvement was huge. Finally, decent tools.
Even debugging worked better via command line GDB. It was more reliable than the one in the IDE, and scriptable.
The quality of what went into the repo went up as well.
I don’t get why these articles get written. They are so predictable and just…overdone. What’s next “the unreasonable effectiveness of the vim text editor”? You are literally verbatim repeating the a thing that has been written one million times.
Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b.
Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most productive.
…but “no IDE” is just rejecting everything because you didn’t like one thing; it’s just being lazy.