Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

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I find it amazing you talk about mindsets that keep us in the status quo, and then you disparage IDE users and write a post full of hacker news groupthink regurgitation. I've noticed the type of person who hate IDEs tend to fall much more into the religious and close-minded crowd than those who don't. Most people I know who use IDEs are perfectly competent at an editor like emacs/vim and simply prefer different tools, but that doesn't stop many people who prefer text editors from trying to feel superior by stereotyping IDE users as paint-by-number morons incapable of embracing the beauty of the command line. It's a traditionalist and condescending attitude that I think is holding us in the status quo more than something like OO's popularity, because there are all sorts of cool programming language ideas you can come up with if you're willing to sacrifice the source code being easily edited by a text editor. Yet we see far less experimentation there then we do with functional programming languages, and I think that's because functional languages are perceived as cool and smart but IDEs are associated with the philistine class of programmers.

1. I hate IDEs for concrete reasons, like being impeded to work with tools for which your IDE does not have a plugin and sometimes it happens even for really mainstream technologies ... how's the C++ support in IntelliJ IDEA these days?

2. Switching between IDEs and editors is a productivity kill, especially if you do that switch a lot - instead of being a creator that bends the tool to your will by customizing it to suit your needs, you're going to be just a casual user that cluelessly clicks around.

That's not so bad, however to be good at what you do you need a certain continuity in the tools you use, otherwise instead of learning about algorithms or design tricks or business, you'll be learning about tools all day; and unfortunately this cannot be applied much to languages and libraries, because these are optimized for different things - although if you worked on the same CRM for the last 5 years I guess it's not that important ... and I don't know in what groups you hang out, but an IDE user that switches a lot or that is familiar with grep/sed is a rare occurrence in my world

3. I love Smalltalk-like environments where the IDE is part of your virtual machine and can see and work with live objects and continuations, but get over it, because your IDE is not like that - yes I would love to escape a little from the text-based world we live in, however the current status-quo of IDEs is still text-based and text-editing isn't even something they do efficiently

4. HN groupthink should be natural, because it has attracted users with similar interests; that's not bad per se, considering that HN users are a small minority and not necessarily because we are smarter, but because we have slightly different interests ... also, I don't see much evidence of groupthink because I always see both sides of the coin in conversations here (you're disproving your own point right now)

5. I never implied that my opinions represents THE truth and I like engaging in such discussions ... instead of reading about the same old farts coming out of tech-darlings of our industry, because in these conversations I might actually learn something

...Surely, you realize the irony of your position, no? One could easily replace "IDE" with "Programming paradigm [X]" and you'd suddenly be the exact person you were railing against in your original post..

How about this.. both have their merits..? Static typed languages do benefit from a good IDE. That said, I personally prefer the cleanness of Sublime Text over a proper IDE -- even at the expense of having to write my own getters and setters! Doesn't mean the other is antithetical to productivity.

Let's end this senseless arguing and just agree that PHP is terrible.

The even bigger irony is that people using terrible languages and paradigms, like PHP and the original Visual Basic, have historically gotten things done, even if that meant shoving a square through a round whole :-)

I guess the curse of "enlightened" people might be that we think way too much about such things.

I think PHP and the original VB were actually great platforms. At the pure language level they were not elegant (but good enough), but both were not just languages, but a platform which as a whole were great for developing a specific kind of apps.

Exactly, I am using Eclipse for Java and vim for Javascript - and it has been delightful. To each his own.

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