[BangPypers] But IDEs rock! (was Google Go)

Pradeep Gowda pradeep at btbytes.com
Wed Nov 11 16:21:14 CET 2009


On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Darkseid <lorddaemon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 2. It's easy to hire an IDE-aware monkey to do programming in "proven
>> technology"
>
> I do most of my work in Ruby (and have done for a few years now). Every day
> I bemoan the lack of a powerful refactoring IDE like Java has in IntelliJ. A
> good IDE is a massive productivity booster; you can only get so far with a
> text editor*, no matter how many macros you have set up. Honestly.

My riff was on the "monkey" part, not on the IDE part. A programmer
who uses IDEs for
refactoring etc., is a more evolved primate, IMO ;)

The bogus argument about "proven technologies" often stems from the belief that
having a point-and-click-and-get-a-banana is a proof of maturity or
"enterprise-readiness" .

Platforms which are heavily IDE centric (eg: MS technologies) tend to
encourage their developers
to think inside the box (IDE) all the time. Even though most Java
programmers do use Eclipse/Netbeans/IntelliJ
it is not unheard of them to use vim/emacs more often than you hear a
.NET developer using them.

IDEs have their advantages. But more often than not, they also hide
complexity behind all the boiler-code and templates.
If programmers had to write XML by hand instead of having them
spit-out by the IDE, we would have seen saner uses of XML
in Java land, for instance.


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