D IDE

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 09/05/2018 01:34 PM, ShadoLight wrote:
> 
> I sometimes wonder if the Vim/Emacs 'affectionados' spend so much time 
> mastering their editors (which by all accounts have a steep learning 
> curve), that they forgot that IDE development did not stagnate after 
> they left!

I sometimes wonder similar things about Vim/Emacs users, too ;)

But don't forget, not all non-IDE people are Vim/Emacs. And just like 
IDE development, plain-editor development didn't stagnate either. Many 
non-IDE users (like me) use editors that are far more contemporary than 
Vim/Emacs and *don't* have that learning curve.

And for that matter, sometimes I get the impression that IDE users think 
non-IDE editors are far less capable than they really are. For the most 
part, "IDE" mostly just means: editor + GUI-based buildsystem + debugger.


> If you are referring to 
> coding where you are developing from scratch, then sure - I agree. You 
> will be doing a lot of coding before building the 1st time. 

No offence, but if that's how someone's developing a new project, then 
they're doing things very, VERY wrong.

*Always* start a new project with some kind of "Hello world" or some 
such which builds and runs *right from the start*, and then grow it from 
there. I'm speaking from decades of experience doing things BOTH ways. 
Ultimately, any time you do a large amount of coding (writing and/or 
editing) in between working builds (no matter if it's the beginning or 
middle of development) then you're just asking for problems.

> For another example IDEs are also in some ways a 'standard' inside big 
> organizations in a way that any editor cannot be - the lowest barrier of 
> entry to get new members up to speed in a team. And for some languages 
> (Java/C#) you give up a lot by not developing inside an IDE. In fact, 
> for Java and C#, the appeal/power of the languages is in many ways 
> directly related to the IDE!

I used to do a lot of Java and C#. I even used to be a big fan of C# 
back in the day (and I still don't really hate it or anything). But 
speaking from experience here: It's not so much that the IDEs are a 
great feature of those languages, it's more like (especially with Java) 
the IDEs are used as a crutch to help mitigate major faults in the 
languages.

But that said, there are examples of IDEs that really do provide a 
genuine benefit beyond mitigating language problems. These tend to be 
domain-specific to at least some extent. Some examples that come to mind 
are the old "RAD"-style tools for GUI apps (like Delphi and VB6). Or 
Unity3D for either games or Flash-like multimedia.