The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Saturday, November 27, 2004

The IDE Divide

The developer world is divided into two camps. Language mavens wax rhapsodic about the power of higher-level programming— first-class functions, staged programming, AOP, MOPs, and reflection. Tool mavens are skilled at the use of integrated build and debug tools, integrated documentation, code completion, refactoring, and code comprehension. Language mavens tend to use a text editor such as emacs or vim these editors are more likely to work for new languages. Tool mavens tend to use IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, that integrate a variety of development tools.

Via Lambda the Ultimate, Oliver Steele: The IDE Divide

I can't stand IDEs. Understandable when you consider that I grew up without them, and the first IDE I did use, Turbo Pascal 3 (around 1987), was so painful because the editor sucked compared to what I was used to (IBM's PE v1.0, written in 1982, which should give you an idea of just how bad I considered the editor under Turbo Pascal 3). Then moving to the Amiga and Unix, where IDEs wheren't really available (unless one wanted to use the monstronsity that is emacs) and well … IDEs are just alien to my way of working (if you thought I was picky about keyboards, I'm just as stubborn about text editors).

So, according to the above article, I don't know if that makes me a Language maven since for me, it's not necessarily about the language, but what editor I can use (and if I can turn off the annoying tendency for syntax highlighting that is all the rage now).

Perhaps I'm an anti-Tool maven more than I'm a Language maven.

Or perhaps I'm reading into this article more than I should.

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