Re:The IDE Divide (2004)
by stephencanon on Thursday November 01, 2012 @04:06PM
(#4729433)
Tom Lehrer is a brilliant satirist and song writer, but he was never a "concert pianist" in the sense that that phrase is typically used, and I understand he essentially stopped being active as a research mathematician ~50 years ago.
That said, there are a number of active research mathematicians who are outstanding musicians, though they tend to not have the time to play enough concerts to be known for it (being busy with math).
Tell that to Tom Lehrer.
Virtually all of the best hackers I can think of eschew IDEs and would be narratized as "language mavens", but they are very particular about their tools, have a set of favored tools, and engage in toolsmithing to extend their reach. Accordingly they select languages in which it is easy to build new tools. (In the past these were usually C, shell, awk, and later Perl; nowadays Python and Ruby are the strongest candidates.)
This dichotomy exists only when you consider programmers whose main goal is to solve problems that fit into a finite number of well-known categories. When a programmer is regularly confronted with problems of unknown scope and complexity and needs a way to dynamically extend his reach, he gravitates to an approach like I described above.