You have a computer right in front of you, why not use it to figure out what your code is doing rather than do the mental gymnastics in your head! This reminds of a story, I think it was dijkstra or maybe Knuth, who was lamenting that their students were being too sloppy because they got to program on interactive terminals and not the punch cards of yesterday. Programming without an IDE is the same...it's using punchcards when something much better is available.
The same could be said about other types of abstractions, such as using a compiler versus assembly. In the vast majority of circumstances, developers get far more accomplished using higher level abstractions and frameworks.
In very extreme circumstances, portions of an application may need to be rewritten at a lower level for optimizations, but that doesn't negate the value provided by abstractions that allow the developer to be more productive expressing higher level concepts while the computer handles the tedium of how those concepts are translated into machine code.
I think the difference here is that in the movement towards 'smart' IDE's, they attempt to go beyond the purely semantic meaning of the code and deduce what the interpreted meaning of it is. I'm all for what is in this article as far as it pertains to more interpretations of the semantic meaning.
The term "IDE" tends to evoke images of highly unwieldy and inflexible mammoths like Eclipse and NetBeans.
Is Acme an IDE? Is Emacs an IDE? One has the plumber, the other has the buffer. They're both small abstractions that can be relentlessly scaled to greatly complex and intelligent workflows.
In contrast, I do not consider the standard IDE to be a great leap. They're actually quite static and the visualization tools they provide through graph structures are primitive for any real white-box analysis.
Kernel developers don't use and IDE for the Linux kernel, and they are arguably some of the best programmers in the world. Great programmers use vim or emacs, because the imagery in their mind is far more powerful than anything an IDE could display. Besides, any screen real estate used for "interpretive" purposes is just an annoyance.
Are they the best developers, and if so how do you measure that?
> Great programmers use vim or emacs
This another form of No True Scotsman, and not a valid argument.
> because the imagery in their mind is far more powerful than anything an IDE could display
How do you know, and how do you measure this? Surely, you would admit that Vi and Emacs are better than pen and paper, or punch cards, right? So does it not follow that Vi and Emacs could be improved upon? Or are they the pinnacle of inputting instructions into a computer? If they are which one is better? Why? How do we measure that?
The steering wheel could be improved upon in some theoretical sense, but the chances are that any new car steered by, say, an iPad is much worse and definitely isn't going to be used in races any time soon.
These kind of generalizations aren't helpful, simply because they aren't true. Are vi and emacs still going to be in wide use 500 years from now? Likely not. Then it stands to reason that there might be a way to improve upon them.
I use an IDE because I don't have to sink an inordinate amount of time into customizing my environment, since that activity doesn't deliver any value to the folks that pay me. I'd prefer to let a really smart team of engineers set those tools up for me. I do not, however, assume that anybody that doesn't use an IDE must be inferior.
Is Visual Studio going to be in use 500 years from now? Light Table? No.
The people who made Visual Studio have not made something that is smarter for everyone's work. Maybe your work just doesn't require any customization. That doesn't mean nobody should ever want customization.
> That doesn't mean nobody should ever want customization.
I fail to see where I made that claim. IDE's are also customizable - I would argue that they are, in fact, much more customizable than either vim or emacs, simply because of the breadth of features one may customize. I was addressing the parent's claim that "great programmers use vim or emacs."
