Comment by bgruber
15 years ago
> 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.
You're right about Emacs+Slime being nice for CL, but I don't think Emacs is very good for C++ and Java code. Visual Studio (and similar IDEs) have some killer features: Intellisense/autocompletion that "just works", an extremely good debugger, visual representation of the project structure, plugins for refactoring, integration with Qt and GUI editors...
I'm mainly a C++ programmer, and yet I use Emacs for everything but C++ (IRC client, LaTeX or text editor, Haskell IDE...).