On Sunday, 29 December 2019 at 14:41:46 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
Whilst many programmers are happy using 1970s approaches to programming using ed, ex, vi, vim, emacs, sublime text, atom, etc. Many programmers prefer using IDEs, and are better programmers for it.
I don't think it's black and white as you make it out to be. When I was programming with JVM languages (Clojure, Scala, a bit of Java) I used Eclipse. I found that to be the right approach for those languages because everything is done in terms of projects. You can offload the management of your projects to the IDE. When I use D, I think in terms of individual files, and the cost-benefit analysis comes out in favor of opening the files in a text editor.
This is not to say that there is anything wrong with using an IDE, it's simply a matter of preference. I have trouble seeing how an IDE is going to make anyone a better programmer. Perhaps a bit more productive, but carrying along the cost of using the IDE, as opposed to simply opening a file and typing. ed and vi have little in common with Emacs or Atom. Many C++ programmers have moved from using an IDE to using Vim, Emacs, and Atom the last few years. You might wish to check out this 10-minute presentation from the recent Emacs conf:
https://media.emacsconf.org/2019/19.html It's definitely not 1970's technology.
