On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 09:25:44PM +0000, Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 December 2019 at 14:41:46 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > Whilst many programmers are happy using 1970s approaches
> 
> Please. Have you actually spent the time to learn these systems in the last 40 years?
> 
> My experience is IDEs are just different, not necessarily better or worse.  Just different enough that people used to one find the others difficult to learn.
[...]

Yeah, vim (and probably emacs -- I don't use it so can't speak for it) has come a *long* ways from its original vi roots. So has CLI development tools in general. I think it's very unfair to equate vim to the 1970's version of vi when comparing it to a GUI-based IDE.

Generally, I find myself *much* more productive with CLI-based tools; IDEs are generally much heavier in terms of memory and CPU usage, and worst of all, require a GUI, which for me is a deal-breaker because I do a lot of work over SSH connections on not necessarily reliable networks. The amount of network traffic needed to operate a GUI over a remote desktop is just so much more than the much lighter weight of a few keystrokes that for me it's a very unproductive choice.  That, plus the amount of RAM + CPU + disk investment needed just to get an IDE to even start, to me cannot even begin to compare to how few resources are needed to be highly productive with a bare-bones Vim installation. I just have a hard time justifying such an investment when what I get in return is so undesirable within my operational parameters.  If I were forced to use an IDE, I would be tempted to just stop programming at all. It would certainly *not* make me a better programmer.


On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 01:26:11AM +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: [...]
> I have trouble seeing how an IDE is going to make anyone a better programmer.
[...]

Yeah, I call BS on that statement.

OTOH, it's certainly a valid point that IDE support needs to be good in order to appeal to that subset of programmers who prefer to work in an IDE.


T

-- 
Today's society is one of specialization: as you grow, you learn more and more about less and less. Eventually, you know everything about nothing.

On 12/30/19 1:43 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 01:26:11AM +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> [...]
>> I have trouble seeing how an IDE is going to make anyone a better
>> programmer.
> [...]
> 
> Yeah, I call BS on that statement.
> 
> OTOH, it's certainly a valid point that IDE support needs to be good in
> order to appeal to that subset of programmers who prefer to work in an
> IDE.

I don't use an IDE for D programming, just vim + cmdline.

However, I DO use one for php (Netbeans) and Swift (xcode).

In both cases, I'm not as familiar with the standard library. In the case of PHP, my IDE tells me types, so it can auto-complete member names (I need this for that project). And especially in the case of Swift, the long verbose names of everything are hard to guess and hard to remember. Not to mention the visual editing of the UI for iOS apps.

If I wrote more code in those languages, I might get to the point where I could remember all the proper names. But I still probably would use the code completion for it to avoid spelling errors -- something like iota is not readily descriptive of what it does, but it's a lot easier to spell correctly than didFinishSettingUpViewController or whatever the hell the real name is.

IMO, the two killer IDE features are code completion and syntax highlighting. Almost every editor (not IDE) already does syntax highlighting and many support code completion. Most of the other stuff is not critical for success. I can read the compiler outputs and figure out the locations of stuff. Yeah, it's nice to have the editor show me there is an error. But I can deal with it otherwise.

-Steve