Comment by SigmundA

I started professionally programming using VB back in the 90's, I remember how amazing it was at the time to use an IDE with autocomplete and a visual debugger coming from just doing basic on say the Commodore. I was never a C or assembly programmer, I understood it but everything I wanted to do I could do much faster in a higher level language in an IDE.

This was back when Windows was finally getting good (Win95) and I was not familiar with Unix at all. All of this seemed like the obvious progression from text base UI's to GUI's.

So for me it has been very natural to use autocomplete and expect to just attach a debugger and inspect running code and even modify it (VB allowed edit and continue) which is still a rare thing today that I miss.

Also using a mouse to move around the code base and inspect it just like using a GUI to use the computer. Because of this I have never developed a strong keyboard only ability, I expect a mouse to be available.

I remember getting into web development and having to step backwards into a language that wasn't really typed and no real IDE's that could autocomplete an interactive debugger, back to print debugging and text searching. Eventually the browser developer tools caught up but the JS language was pretty difficult to accurately autocomplete and navigate / refactor properly at a code level with an IDE.

Was fun to watch all the JS devs get excited over Typescript because autocomplete and refactor now worked reliably. For me having a language with real types the IDE can understand was the way it's supposed to be.

It seems like it's how you got started that determines your preference. If you were a Unix guy you liked the command line and TUI's and everything was about wrangling things at a text level, everything is a file and just a stream of bytes. If you were a Windows or Mac person then it was GUI's and mouse interaction and it was more about widgets and objects and IDE's.

I can appreciate both sides, I would like to be stronger in the command line and keyboard but how I got started strong influences the tooling I prefer and I am sort of set in my ways now, I suspect that is pretty typical.