Comment by coliveira

> Even for C/C++, the only reason why there is a Visual Studio is that there are so many entry level programmers that will buy it. Experienced C programmers feel much more comfortable using UNIX/gdb.

That comment is insulting, impossibly overgeneralized, and counterfactual, all in one. Heck, I'd be hard-pressed not to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger before trying to work with gdb and anything multithreaded, and for anything more than doing an autopsy on a core dump gdb is still user-hostile and obnoxious. Visual Studio is _so_ much less of a hassle than trying to pore over obfuscatory gdb backtraces.

I pay for a personal license for Visual Studio because it lets me get my work done without wasting my time. And I'm a pretty experienced developer, both on Unix and Windows (though I've moved away from C because it is a poor choice for the development I most enjoy doing).

I disagree wholeheartedly.

Ruby uses runtime name resolution. When you use a name "x", it is impossible (in the general case) to figure out what the name refers to statically.

Thus, in Ruby and other dynamic languages, there's much less an IDE can do. Even renaming a variable is an undecidable problem in these languages.

I know plenty of experienced/talented C/C++ programmers, and most of them prefer to use IDE's despite recognizing some of the weaknesses of contemporary IDE's. I've been programming C for 15 years (of these, 10 were professionally) and I would love to use a good IDE.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a good IDE yet and so I make do with emacs. But the moment I find a good IDE with usable refactoring tools while still retaining emacs-level keyboard macros and other useful features of emacs, I'll switch.

> The reason Lisp programmers don't have a fancy IDE is that they don't feel the need for it. Everyone that really understands what he's doing is using Emacs or their own thing.

Actually, I think that Emacs+Slime for CL is one of the fanciest IDEs around.

However, it's also been my (anecdotal) experience that many C++/Java-programming Emacs users have no idea what kind of stuff these fancy IDEs do, the same way most of those IDE users don't have any understanding of the kind of text editing Emacs is capable of.