Re:What's the Future of IDEs?
by marginalia_nu on Wednesday November 24, 2021 @03:24PM
(#29334700)
I do think there is room for nuance.
I learned to code like you suggest. I started with C, in vi, I learned it from the words of Kernighan and Ritchie and I had no forums or syntax highlighting or anything to hold my hands, and when stuff didn't work, I got compiler error messages so obtuse they might as well have been in Linear B, I walked uphill both ways and it was -40 and blizzard even in the summer. I do absolutely concede the type of language-understanding and skill set this promotes does make you a better developer.
However.
I do not think that stubbornly refusing to use an IDE makes you a better developer. A good IDE is powerful, and can be a real force multiplier that makes you able to work with much larger systems and significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend doing menial repetitive typing.
You can absolutely subsist on the simplest of tools, but you can absolutely do more with the more powerful ones.
I learned to code like you suggest. I started with C, in vi, I learned it from the words of Kernighan and Ritchie and I had no forums or syntax highlighting or anything to hold my hands, and when stuff didn't work, I got compiler error messages so obtuse they might as well have been in Linear B, I walked uphill both ways and it was -40 and blizzard even in the summer. I do absolutely concede the type of language-understanding and skill set this promotes does make you a better developer.
However.
I do not think that stubbornly refusing to use an IDE makes you a better developer. A good IDE is powerful, and can be a real force multiplier that makes you able to work with much larger systems and significantly cuts down on the amount of time you spend doing menial repetitive typing.
You can absolutely subsist on the simplest of tools, but you can absolutely do more with the more powerful ones.