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Comment by msluyter | Hacker News Reader

Well, sure, but that's why you don't share project files.

I think that if you do things correctly, your concern is mostly mitigated. My last job was Java/Spring. As someone noted above, you really don't want to be working with Java/Spring without IntelliJ.

But we never had issues with anyone breaking builds due to screwing up project files, because those weren't shared and the project would run/build/test immediately after import into the IDE without any additional tweaks.

I think it's sort of odd that many folks complain about IDEs, but then use vim with a million plugins. Isn't vim + plugins = IDE? Or, if the overall point is "java sucks, don't use java" then fine, but if you have to use it, I couldn't even imagine using plain old vim without any language support...

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Sure. Does it require a specific IDE then? Does it cleanly import, from scratch, with working tests and etc, regardless of whether they're using Eclipse, IntelliJ, Netbeans, etc? Or is there One True IDE? Is that IDE available everywhere you have to touch code? Is it straightforward to integrate it with your CI/CD tools, despite conforming to that IDE convention? Will it continue to cleanly import after you've left the code to rot for a couple of years in production, and then have to come back in to maintain it? Etc. I've been bitten by all of these.

Whereas I've gone to projects that were written without all of this, and even without getting the code to even compile locally (because of dependency hell that I didn't want to suffer through if I didn't have to), was able to diagnose and fix issues, because the code was written to be understood with only a text editor.

The idea is that you still conform to the convention of the project (Rails, Spring, etc.), not the IDE, and the FOSS CLI tools etc. can still understand the project, but so does the IDE (because it is made to understand the convention, e.g. how the annotations/XML files work, how to get a list of all your Rake tasks).

By not sharing IDE project files, not having any IDE-specific machinery in the project, but still expecting CI to be able to run it, being able to theoretically hack on the project and get results (build, test) even with just bash and grep and nano, you get the best of both worlds.

Modern IDEs are better at this than they ever used to be. I was really anti-IDE for a long time, but JetBrains' products made it make sense finally.

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