On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight@gmail.com> wrote:

Jussi Jumppanen wrote:

Bruno Medeiros Wrote:

Before some people here say they don't use an IDE, but instead use <editor foo with syntax highlighting and little more than that> and are fine with it,

I would say that the reason developers still prefer to code with text editors rather than IDE's is they find the text editor more productive. Eclipse based IDE are just far too slow for a good developer's fingers.

When you're used to a super quick, highly responsive editor, it can be terribly frustrating to have you step down to a slow IDE.
The slowness of the keyboard response turns what was an automatic action, that of typing, into a though process and this plays havoc with the 'thinking about the code while I type' through process.

Bullshit. Do you have a 200 MhZ Pentium with 128MB RAM? Even then, IDEs are going to prioritize the editor itself over any autocomplete/background processing, so the editor shouldn't be any less responsive. It might take 5 seconds if you click "go to definition" and it has to open a new file, but that's vs 2 minutes of searching for an import, finding the file location, and using find to get to the definition in that file.

The issue is the placebo effect and the comfort zone... which are real issues (that's why so many people are like "oh, Vista is soooo bloated compared to XP"...). If you've been using ed to write code for the last 30 years, the mental concept of using your $2000 computer to its full potential to help you write software is mind-boggling. If you're more comfortable with your "power-editor" or just can't deal with a 1-minute startup time for a product you're going to be using for 8 hours, well all the more power to ya; no amount of productivity gains could make you willing to switch.

I'm not saying "more complex is always better," but why let all that processing power go to waste?

I think part of the problem is that there are a whole lot of IDEs that really don't live up to the potential you guys are talking about. Plus IDEs come with their own set of problems. For instance I just wasted most of a day getting a MSVC7 project set up to also work with MSVC9. That's just ridiculous. Microsoft goes and makes these minor changes to their project file formats for every release of Visual Studio, and then only provide a tool to do 1-way, in-place upgrades of all your project files. It's insane. Just imagine if you were forced to fork your makefiles for every dang version of GCC that comes out. The way project management works in IDEs is often just completely silly like that.

The so called "Intellisense" in Visual Studio also has historically been pretty lame, with refactoring support basically non-existant. The Visual Assist add-on from Whole Tomato was pretty much a "must" to bring it up to snuff. I get the impression that the Java IDEs offer a lot more on the refactoring frontier. So that's just to say, it's easy to get the impression that IDEs are not useful because there are many IDEs that genuinely are not that useful. I can see where Jussi is coming from. I have a feeling when Brunos says "IDE" he's thinking of IDEs at their very best. Not another one of these lame editors with syntax highlighting and a "compile" button that claims to be an IDE.

I still primarily like to use my good ole emacs for writing large amounts of new code. There I don't find all the little buttons and completion popups and things in an IDE very useful. But when it comes to debugging and fixing code, damn it's nice to have the IDE there with all it's quick cross-linking abilities. The integrated debugger in MSVC is also damn fine.

--bb