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Benefits of Not Using an IDE

alexander-hansen.dev

191–200 of 389 posts

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need an IDE for Java. That language is built for IDE. The requirement is a little bit less for some other popular languages.

Any statically typed language benefits greatly from an IDE, if only for the automatic refactoring. Dynamically typed languages can hardly be automatically refactored.

I don't like PyCharm, but it can certainly refactor Python programs. What are you talking about?

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#192

Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b. Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most produc…

jesus christ. coding used to mean something. i guess we all should eat baby food because we arent being smart cool or clever by wasting time and energy chewing.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Error highlighting. this so much. it's priceless to just type a line and have some warnings such as "hey, you're moving this value but using the variable afterwards, take care" or "hey, it looks like you are only using this argument as a reference, consider not passing it by value" just pop up next to the offending line ; when compared to an IDE-less workflow I pretty much divide the amount of hitting "build" I n…

I get those exact same warnings in Vim :)

Vanilla vim without any extension ? Otherwise you're just reimplementing your own IDE by hand in your vim config

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#194
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're do…

The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them. Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter? Is there so much boilerplate or X…

"An IDE can be a powerful abstraction, but when the underlying layer it's abstracting over becomes inaccessible, then all it's doing is adding more complexity by obscuring concrete details"

This. All day long.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#195

The author seems to use IDE for one purpose only: to auto-generate boilerplate code. But this is far from the only benefits of IDEs! I rarely use IDEs for code generation, I don't even like autocomplete. For this stuff I use code snippets; I develop collections of those for any language I use. You don't need an IDE for it; any good text editor has such features. For me really important features of a good IDE are: - N…

There are languages and environments that are more prone to requiring IDEs.

For example, when I write React and I use the Foo component, either it is defined on the same file or it is in one of the imports.

On the other hand, with Angular, the foo component is not imported anywhere. In fact, there is no foo component, just one or many Foo components which declare to use the foo tag, and one or another may be loaded depending on the context of the current component. Good luck getting anything done with such an obfuscated environment without tools to deobfuscate it.

And then you have the heavy enterprise frameworks that make a science out of obfuscated code, so that you don't know what code is being executed, because it is hidden behind several layers of inheritance and interfaces, and the instance to create is choosen via xml-configurable meta-programming based dependency injector. Working with such code is guaranteed insanity without heavy IDEs. I would say it's also insanity with heavy IDEs, but people tend to find that opinion controversial.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#196
one trauma from eclipse days, is that for instance, libs thus classpath management was left to eclipse devs .. and I had no idea what was going on, why it worked, what differences between the options ..

when I could write a makefile to finally jar / launch a java app on my own, I felt such a relief..

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#197

Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b. Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most produc…

The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're do…

This is a bit of a cargo cult argument.

Specifically: "The best developers" indeed know how to work without an IDE. They also know 5 programming languages, 50 libraries, and know a whole bevy of esoteric randomness, such as difference between a Thompson-NFA style regex engine and the limitations thereof, or something like that.

There is no such thing as a 'the best developer' that doesn't know much. The 'knows many things and has lots of experience' is a tautologic argument.

In the mean time, bad programmers 'use an IDE a lot and are lost without it'. That's also tautologic.

In other words, your observation proves absolutely nothing, in regards to whether it is wise to use an IDE or not. You're not going to magically turn a bad programmer into a good one by uninstalling their IDE. You're not going to ensure a new programmer is going to turn into a good one if you advise them to forego an IDE, nor will you ruin a potentially good one if you install an IDE on their computer.

It says nothing.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#199
post #134

None of this matters in the slightest as soon as you have to work with other people on stuff. At that point common tooling is more important than specific personalised tooling. If everyone is using IntelliJ and you're using Atom, it's going to be problematic. Not because of either of those tools, but because you now have a discrepancy that is not relevant to the work you're doing yet it's creating problems for the wo…

Enforcing an IDE across a team for consistency is a real stinky smell. You don't have CI/CD? You sure as hell aren't going to run an IDE in CircleCI or Jenkins to do your builds.

This has nothing to do with CI/CD or forcing anything on anyone. It has to do with being similar enough in a team to be able to work together. Being unique or different to a degree that it is hurting your (and by extension your team's) performance is bad.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#200
post #179
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t quite get this as an argument for forcing a prescribed IDE on team members. You mention scaffolding tests, things like this can be left to external tools and then it works for all IDEs and all editors. Then you can let people use what they find most ergonomic.

Not OP. But having to sit for an hour watching some Vscode dev struggling to run tests or get auto complete on some random function is a waste of time. They spend more time faffing about fixing and fiddling with that than it would take to install a proper IDE and load up the same project and have it 100% work. Like I get it, some people know their language inside and out and can fix it in a second because they know a…

Against though that sound like more of the same argument. If you set up external tooling to run the tests you can just tell them to use that with nothing to set up.

Either way whatever tool you use, nothing can be worse than pairing with someone who copies and pastes with a mouse.

I can just feel my life ebbing away as my inner voice screams “LEARN THE SHORTCUTS” and they slowly move 3 characters across the screen, make a mistake and try again. :P

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