Community (A Modest Proposal)

[Michael Torrie]

On 06/15/2010 01:30 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> I know that lots of people swear by IDEs, and back in Ancient Days I used 
> to use the THINK Pascal IDE on a Macintosh so I'm not hostile to the 
> idea. But in those days you could only run one app at a time, so you 
> needed an IDE or you'd go insane. These days I have an xterm open with a 
> couple of tabs in one window, an editor open in the other, and it all 
> Just Works. The only nuisance is when I get a traceback, I have to 
> manually copy the line number from the terminal window and paste it into 
> the Go To Line dialog in my editor, instead of the editor magically 
> scrolling to the right line automatically. But other than that, I don't 
> see the advantage of an IDE. What am I missing?

In some languages, due to the size and complexity of the libraries, an
IDE is essential.  Java is one of those languages.  C++ development also
highly benefits.  Any compiled language also benefits from the project
management and build management tools that an IDE provides.  Project and
build management and code completion are the killer features of IDEs.
Vim has some code completion, but it's nowhere as easy to use or
complete as in Visual Studio.

With python I can usually get away with one interactive python session,
a vim editor, my Python in a nutshell book, and the python.org docs.
That's largely because python's standard libraries have help strings,
and python lets you navigate the live object space.  Also it helps that
Python's libraries don't get hung up quite so much on patterns and
LongDescriptiveNames.