One of my first jobs was writing PHP when editors only had syntax highlighting support for the language. I learned to write, debug, and refactor in Vim and 15 years later I’ve continued to do the same for Java, C, C++, JS, etc. Projects with 10s of KLOC (one of them might be 100s).
It’s a different state of mind from IDE users. Not better or worse, just different. I’d hate to be stuck in IntelliJ all day, but most of my colleagues love it. As long as we’re all productive, to each their own.
That said, I’m a polyglot, so learning specific IDEs and plugins for all of the different languages and DSLs I use throughout the week sounds miserable to me).
I learned to code in Jupyter notebooks. I can't wrap my head around an editor or IDE, I build programs by writing small snippets of code, with all my variables loaded. When it does what I want I move to the next cell. Eventually I'll paste it all into a text editor do some final debugging and that's it. It is very annoying though when I want to start on an old program. I think I should try Spyder or something soon.
A quick edit might be something shallow like changing a config setting, editing a template, or maybe fixing a bug where you have the stack trace and it's a one-line change. You can find the file to edit based on a search, make a quick patch, run tests, and send it for review by someone who understands the project better. Deep understanding is not required.
Re:Leapfrogging the IDE
by RussianCow on Monday November 12, 2018 @12:51PM
(#18434191)
Plus, per-project IDE configuration should be extremely minimal—maybe 15-20 minutes at most?—so I can't imagine that ever being a bottleneck for a new project.
This is perhaps doable if you're talking about assembly-line-cookie-cutter projects, or maybe you're talking about super-geniuses? It takes me a minimum of hours to days before I'm ready to "make a quick edit" on a project I've never seen.