Re:The IDE As a Bad Programming Language Enabler
by kstenerud on Sunday November 18, 2012 @11:30AM
(#4800849)
"won't venture into some places that a good engineer needs to go, because to be decent at the job you really do need to understand the command-line interface"
This is only true if the IDE has not kept up with the command line interface. Visual Studio and Xcode do pretty much everything their CLI can do except maybe some tool integration like CI or deployment. But that's operations, not programming.
"IDEs are a good tool that ... is very often put to bad use."
So is every other tool out there. What's your point?
"The one thing they are really good for (reading low-quality code) is something engineers hate doing."
They are also good for:
- Writing good quality code.
- Looking up methods.
- Code completion.
- Code navigation.
- Interactive debugging.
The list goes on.
"IDE-dependence is evil"
No it is not. You might as well say static analysis dependence is evil or compile-time optimization is evil or profilers are evil or any other convenience is evil. Should we all remain puritans and suffer cryptic and unwieldy tools just because making them more powerful and friendly also makes them more powerful and friendly for bad programmers?
Bad programmers will write bad code no matter what tools they use. Blaming the IDE is disingenuous and quite frankly comes off as arrogant and elitist.
This is only true if the IDE has not kept up with the command line interface. Visual Studio and Xcode do pretty much everything their CLI can do except maybe some tool integration like CI or deployment. But that's operations, not programming.
"IDEs are a good tool that ... is very often put to bad use."
So is every other tool out there. What's your point?
"The one thing they are really good for (reading low-quality code) is something engineers hate doing."
They are also good for:
- Writing good quality code.
- Looking up methods.
- Code completion.
- Code navigation.
- Interactive debugging.
The list goes on.
"IDE-dependence is evil"
No it is not. You might as well say static analysis dependence is evil or compile-time optimization is evil or profilers are evil or any other convenience is evil. Should we all remain puritans and suffer cryptic and unwieldy tools just because making them more powerful and friendly also makes them more powerful and friendly for bad programmers?
Bad programmers will write bad code no matter what tools they use. Blaming the IDE is disingenuous and quite frankly comes off as arrogant and elitist.