Seeking old post on developers who like IDEs vs developers who like simple languages

[Colin J. Williams]

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
> Steve Ferg wrote:
>> On the one hand, there are developers who love big IDEs with lots of
>> features (code generation, error checking, etc.), and rely on them to
>> provide the high level of support needed to be reasonably productive
>> in heavy-weight languages (e.g. Java).
>>
>> On the other hand there are developers who much prefer to keep things
>> light-weight and simple.  They like clean high-level languages (e.g.
>> Python) which are compact enough that you can keep the whole language
>> in your head, and require only a good text editor to be used
>> effectively.
> 
> This distinction is IMHO not correct. If you took a look at Java, you would
> notice that the core language syntax is much simpler than Python's. OTOH,
> if you add the standard libraries, you would soon see that Python's
> libraries are not as consistent (i.e. conformant to PEP8) as Java's.
> 
> What makes up for Python's perceived usability problems though is the
> commandline parser that allows you to inspect the type of an object and its
> parts of it at runtime, in particular the docstrings are a treasure there.
> 
> That said, an IDE that provides auto-completion (e.g. that gives you a list
> of available class members) is a good thing in Java, because you don't have
> to browse the documentation as often. With Python, that is impossible
> because there are no types bound to parameters, so any type that fits is
> allowed (duck typing).

I suggest that you look at PyScripter. 
It's helped if there is a doc string and 
if the parameters are spelled out i.e. 
not *args or **kwargs,

Colin W.
> 
> Uli
>