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Discussion on: ELI5: What is IDE or an IDE?

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Dian Fay

It stands for "integrated development environment". An IDE is a glorified text editor with a built-in compiler and other tooling, with the idea that you should be able to write, test, launch, and package your code all from the same application. They're convenient but the convenience tends to hide a lot of what's going on.

IDEs usually focus on development in one or a few languages. Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are IDEs for Java, Visual Studio is an IDE for Microsoft's .Net language family, PyCharm is an IDE for Python, and so on.