[erlang-questions] IDE Bashing (Was Re: [erlang-questions] "Erlang as a First Language" -- crazy? or just stupid?)

[egarrulo]

2009/12/29 Fred Hebert <mononcqc@REDACTED>

> Am I alone to think that lots of people organize their work in different
> manners? People will draw graphs on paper, take notes on an empty file or a
> sheet, organize stuff in tables, explore files with grep or whatever search
> facility they have, use their IDEs, use code skeletons or auto-completion,
> etc.
>
> I'm usually annoyed by programmers' frequent search for one true way™ to do
> things. Most of us have different ways to organize our thoughts when
> writing
> texts, emails, preparing daily tasks (like groceries and whatnot), do math,
> etc. Why would it be necessary for everyone to either use an IDE or use
> none? We've got a bunch of languages all adapted to the task at hand. We
> also have a bunch of tools adapted to different manners to organize
> thoughts.
>
> I'm having trouble grasping why some if not most of us often have a hard
> time accepting different people might do things differently to achieve good
> results. Why should anyone care about the tools the others use, as long as
> the code is right, clean and maintainable?
>

I don't think people are against IDEs in general. They are against
inflexible, slow and monolithic tools, that is what current IDEs are (if you
think Eclipse is flexible, then try Emacs). Working your way by using tinier
tools can be more productive than having to warp your way around bigger
tools. Experience you gain by using tinier tools adds up and will stay with
you, whilst experience you gain by using a monolithic IDE could become
useless with your IDE's next version.

When I upgraded from Visual Studio 6 to Visual Studio .NET, all my handy
macros became useless. When I had to develop Java code, all my experience
with Visual Studio was close to useless.