A timely article, as I've just submitted a set of two posts to my company's blog on the same subject. I guess they'll be published sometime in the next few weeks. Anyway, I decided to deal with the issues you listed by seeing how far I could go in the opposite direction.
I built a lean Linux VM with 512 MB memory and installed the packages and tooling to support 35 programming, scripting, and markup languages with just one editor - NeoVim. The purpose was to prove or disprove the hypothesis that a very lightweight setup could provide a satisfactory and productive developer experience.
The laptop I've been using has 25 IDEs installed on it, by the way. The best of them exhibit the behaviors you list in your article. It goes downhill from there.
One additional point you didn't mention. IDE support for version control systems tends to be flakey and incomplete. I find it much easier to interact with those tools from a command line even in cases when I'm using an IDE. Definitely agree with you regarding refactoring, though.
Of course, I don't need support for 35 languages. I wanted to stuff the VM full of tools and see if it would still work. It did. Not all those languages are well enough supported with NeoVim or Vim to make that environment suitable, but for most of them it's perfectly okay.
In some cases, I found the developer workflow was actually smoother and better than the equivalent activities with an IDE (for instance Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and COBOL). In others, a specialized IDE really is better even if it's possible to manage without one (for example, Java/Groovy, R, and specialized things like Arduino, Android, and iOS development). I also didn't have great luck with the Lisp-like languages using just NeoVim, but it wasn't a show-stopper. .NET development feels about the same as using VSCode. Markup languages like HTML and CSS and supersets like Haml and Sass feel about the same as Sublime Text (and I mean that in a good way).
I'm an oldtimer, so I didn't have to go through what you describe in the second half of your article, and as a TDD practitioner I rarely have to resort to a debugger. I can imagine people who learned to program with an IDE might not really know what's going on under the covers, and would have to backtrack a bit to pick up that info. I've noticed a lot of programmers aren't really sure which functions are part of the language and which are part of the IDE. But I'm sure they can learn that fairly quickly.
IDEs are perfectly good tools as long as we use them as conveniences and not as crutches. In many cases, they aren't really all that helpful.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
A timely article, as I've just submitted a set of two posts to my company's blog on the same subject. I guess they'll be published sometime in the next few weeks. Anyway, I decided to deal with the issues you listed by seeing how far I could go in the opposite direction.
I built a lean Linux VM with 512 MB memory and installed the packages and tooling to support 35 programming, scripting, and markup languages with just one editor - NeoVim. The purpose was to prove or disprove the hypothesis that a very lightweight setup could provide a satisfactory and productive developer experience.
The laptop I've been using has 25 IDEs installed on it, by the way. The best of them exhibit the behaviors you list in your article. It goes downhill from there.
One additional point you didn't mention. IDE support for version control systems tends to be flakey and incomplete. I find it much easier to interact with those tools from a command line even in cases when I'm using an IDE. Definitely agree with you regarding refactoring, though.
Of course, I don't need support for 35 languages. I wanted to stuff the VM full of tools and see if it would still work. It did. Not all those languages are well enough supported with NeoVim or Vim to make that environment suitable, but for most of them it's perfectly okay.
In some cases, I found the developer workflow was actually smoother and better than the equivalent activities with an IDE (for instance Scala, Clojure, Ruby, and COBOL). In others, a specialized IDE really is better even if it's possible to manage without one (for example, Java/Groovy, R, and specialized things like Arduino, Android, and iOS development). I also didn't have great luck with the Lisp-like languages using just NeoVim, but it wasn't a show-stopper. .NET development feels about the same as using VSCode. Markup languages like HTML and CSS and supersets like Haml and Sass feel about the same as Sublime Text (and I mean that in a good way).
I'm an oldtimer, so I didn't have to go through what you describe in the second half of your article, and as a TDD practitioner I rarely have to resort to a debugger. I can imagine people who learned to program with an IDE might not really know what's going on under the covers, and would have to backtrack a bit to pick up that info. I've noticed a lot of programmers aren't really sure which functions are part of the language and which are part of the IDE. But I'm sure they can learn that fairly quickly.
IDEs are perfectly good tools as long as we use them as conveniences and not as crutches. In many cases, they aren't really all that helpful.