On 12/30/19 1:43 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 01:26:11AM +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn
wrote:
[...]
I have trouble seeing how an IDE is going to make anyone a better
programmer.
[...]
Yeah, I call BS on that statement.
OTOH, it's certainly a valid point that IDE support needs to be good in
order to appeal to that subset of programmers who prefer to work in an
IDE.
I don't use an IDE for D programming, just vim + cmdline.
However, I DO use one for php (Netbeans) and Swift (xcode).
In both cases, I'm not as familiar with the standard library. In the
case of PHP, my IDE tells me types, so it can auto-complete member names
(I need this for that project). And especially in the case of Swift, the
long verbose names of everything are hard to guess and hard to remember.
Not to mention the visual editing of the UI for iOS apps.
If I wrote more code in those languages, I might get to the point where
I could remember all the proper names. But I still probably would use
the code completion for it to avoid spelling errors -- something like
iota is not readily descriptive of what it does, but it's a lot easier
to spell correctly than didFinishSettingUpViewController or whatever the
hell the real name is.
IMO, the two killer IDE features are code completion and syntax
highlighting. Almost every editor (not IDE) already does syntax
highlighting and many support code completion. Most of the other stuff
is not critical for success. I can read the compiler outputs and figure
out the locations of stuff. Yeah, it's nice to have the editor show me
there is an error. But I can deal with it otherwise.
-Steve
