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Great post and most of these steps are really helpful.

The only thing I'm not too sure about is step 11, discouraging of IDEs. I do agree with your point that one should not depend on a IDE. However, IDEs can give you autocompletion, easy refactoring, finding references etcetera. Personally, I find some of these features invaluable.




I get autocompletion and finding of references in every editor I've used for at least the past decade.

As for easy refactoring, I definitely found it useful when I was doing C#. In hindsight I think it became a bit of a crutch and prevented me from properly re-considering how I should approach the problem and instead ended up with essentially the same but neater code.


I'm still having trouble wording Step 11, I'll admit. I often think that IDEs make the programmer a little too lazy (hear me out). If you're to the point where you can't remember where certain methods are defined, how something should be refactored, etc., your project probably got too bloated long ago.

By forcing you to keep much of the project in human memory, services, in the world of the web, are encouraged to get spun off much sooner.




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