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Comment by seer-zig | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the "don't need to use an IDE" excuse. Almost any present day project is big enough that you need an IDE, regardless of how simple a language is. This is even more so for dynamic languages. Who doesn't want immediate type checking, safe and effective refactoring, call stack lookup, and the many other features an IDE provides? Do people making that claim write code in notepad or something?

Modern Java isn't really any more verbose than other languages it gets compared against. It is very nicely balanced between expressiveness and readability.

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No. The choice isn't limited to an IDE or Notepad. There's also the choice of a reasonably powerful text editor like Emacs, Vim, or VS Code. Those have many of the advantages of an IDE while still being more flexible and not trapping you into an IDE platform that is often hard to move way from (generally by intention by the IDE creators who want lock-in).

The poster was saying that Java is so complex that you need an IDE. People use VS Code to write Java today, does that mean that they're not using an IDE? As long as the same features are offered in VS Code and IntelliJ/Eclipse/NetBeans/etc., then the distinction is really nothing worth talking about.

VS Code is an IDE.

Then Emacs is an IDE and Vim is an IDE. VS Code is just a text editor that has extensions for specific programming languages, just like Emacs and Vim. The confusion is just because it happens to be named after an actual IDE Visual Studio, which it has little to do with just for marketing purposes (like how JavaScript has little to do with Java).

> VS Code is just a text editor that has extensions for specific programming languages

Extensions that offer syntax highlighting, debugging, refactoring, code inspection, command line integration, dependency management, etc. How is that different from an IDE?

All those can be done in Emacs and Vim though. VS Code is only surprising to people who haven't used serious text editors, which have had these features for decades. But what Emacs, Vim, and VS Code don't have that IDEs do is the idea of proprietary "projects" for building your code that don't work if you don't use the IDE. Instead you are free to use whatever system you want. Makefiles. Cmake. Ant. Maven., etc. Your choice, which you can easily use with any other editor you choose.

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