IDE’s Slow Me Down

I recently came across some experienced developers that continue to use a trusty text-editor for development purposes.

Now….I can recall the days when I considered auto-completion to be the root of ignorance – how could you possibly learn an API by not referring to its doco? Surely you’d be more encouraged to commit the API to memory without auto-completion? I could always find situations where an editor would automatically do something that wasn’t what I intended – insert spaces here, use tabs there, name variables poorly, place brackets in the wrong location. To cut to the chase, I imagined a plethora of reasons for holding back.

Sure, IDE’s had many drawbacks – 5 year ago. If you hold to these beliefs today, simply put, you’re a dinosaur. IDE’s of today allow developers to reap substantial productivity rewards. They are more configurable and more intelligent, they make class navigation and manipulation a breeze.

Still, hold a discussion with these lads about it and you’d soon delve into an emotion charged discussion, logic and reason taking a back-seat. Somehow it always rose to the top-tier of the NLP rung, like a child feverishly gripping their blankie. To them it was no sweat to ask developers using IDE’s to perform refactorings difficult to express in regular expressions. When pairing with these developers you’d quickly get a feel for how simple activities - like file navigation, refactoring, getting code to compile – were painstakingly drawn out. Clearly the implications of this attitude are more significant on Agile projects.

Much has to be said for allowing developers the freedom to choose their preferred development tools – but I guess this type of freedom implies ’so long as productivity is not compromised’.

Certainly without an IDE productivity is compromised. Please conscientious development teams, veto the use of text editors for development purposes. It should be non-negotiable, no argument could reasonably justify their use. If you continue to use them, I offer some simple advice - evolve or perish.