IDEs and programming languages

[Walter Bright]

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.)