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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

I think a proper response to any question of this form is "why use an X if you can get what you want without an X?"

It's a shame you got downvoted. It's clear you thought this through further than the people who downvoted you.

For anyone who didn't get it: You have to actually spell out what you want before you can say if it fits this answer or not. The car vs bike thing only makes sense if you didn't care how fast you got there, how tired you were when you arrived, or how much pain it was to haul the luggage there.

The answer to original question is easy in that light: Because IDEs aren't the only solution to the problem. Just because IDEs have a certain feature is no reason that other things can't have that feature as well.

Why use a car for your 100 mile journey when you can get there by bicycle? :-)

Well if "what you want", doesn't include "in a timely manner", I would personally always chose the bike ;)

Try carrying a nontrivial amount of baggage on a bike.

(No, the correct answer to this is not "Don't carry luggage." You can't solve a problem by chopping its legs off so it fits in your problem-solving grid.)

So extending your analogy, you prefer travelling by truck over travelling by car ?

Define your problem, and then make your decision.

For this particular example, you can apply this sequence of logic (with thanks to wccrawford):

  if(Baggage)  use a car.
  else if(In a hurry?)  use a car.
  else if(Need to be rested?)  use a car.
  else if(Need to go 150 miles^ or more?) use a car.
  else use a bike.

^ You'll need to set this value yourself ;)

An interesting point which is perhaps germaine, perhaps not - the bicycle is by far the most energy efficient form of human transportation. This is because it makes best use of the highly efficient biological engine we all already posses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Energy_effi...

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