IDEs and programming languages

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
>> I also agree with Walter about the lack of an IDE for D as powerful as 
>> Visual Studio, I myself use poseidon only because of its overly simple 
>> build process and simple project manager and debug in windbg. But that 
>> isn't the case with most programmers who like or dislike a language 
>> based on the IDE they use.
> 
> I do hear over and over that without a VS workalike IDE, programmers 
> just aren't interested in a language. They argue, probably with a lot of 
> merit, that the productivity increase of using VS is more than the 
> productivity increase of using a better language.
> 
> It's clear Microsoft has hit a home run with VS.
> 
> I was talking to some serious hardcore C++ programmers yesterday. One 
> was a die-hard emacs user, and he admitted that he'd switched to VS and 
> wasn't looking back, it was that much better. I asked him what the 
> killer feature of VS was, and he said it was being able to instantly see 
> every use and definition of a symbol.
> 
> (With emacs he'd have to run ctags first, and even then ctags was 
> inaccurate and clumsy.)

Yeah I'm also a die hard fan of VS when coding C/C++, while I don't 
require many features when I write code other than a project manager, 
syntax highlighter and a convenient build tool, I do use way more of its 
features when I study code I didn't write myself. The ability to grep 
for every reference to a given symbol from a simple click is simply 
amazing for that, jumping to the declaration of a symbol is also as 
useful, so is the call browser.

An IDE doesn't require a large set of features to be useful, but it 
definitely needs to implement the features it has in such a convenient 
way that you don't notice their presence. I myself often disable the 
annoying suggestion popups in an IDE and a few other features, but thats 
just me :)