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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

I really love one of the points Carmack makes: You are leaving productivity on the table by not using an IDE. IDEs bring you closer to the Lisp/Smalltalk ideal of live-coding a running system, but with programming languages people are likely to use. Text editor based edit/compile/run workflows are pointless grognardism by sticking with "stone knives and bearskins" tooling.

Use a goddamn IDE, you filthy barbarians.

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Who doesn't use an IDE? I've known developers who used only VIM back in the day. I don't know of any dev that doesn't use one, nowadays.

Do they use a debugger as a tool of first resort? Do they step through their code line by line?

One of Carmack's points was that gdb's terrible interface has made debuggers a tool of last resort in the Linux/open source world, when they should be a tool of first resort, and code should be stepped through even before it's run normally because that's how you get a clear picture of how it runs. Visual Studio's excellent debugger integration alone has made the open source development experience truly "stone knives and bearskins" by comparison until relatively recently.

I've seen it at most places I've worked. A lot of people still use just VIM and the command line only.

Maybe it stems from Linux Torvald's hate of debuggers ? https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65

Back in the day, from the people who brought you commercial Smalltalk:

July 10, 1989 "ParcPlace Systems Inc, of Mountain View California, has launched its Objectworks software development system for AT&T’s C++ Release 2.0: the integrated set of object-oriented tools include an incremental compiler and linker, source level debugger and source code browsing, and will be available in late August for Sun Microsystems’s Sun-3 workstation, selling for $2,500."

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/parcplace_launches_objectw...

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