Comment by avalys
1 year ago
When I'm coding, most of my time is spent thinking about the right structure, organization, or solution. Or, debugging something that isn't acting as expected (which, again, is mostly thinking).
I spend comparably little time actually writing the code.
If there is an IDE available that works well out of the box, I'll certainly use whatever automation is available. But often it is broken, incomplete, slow, inaccurate, etc. and rather than spend countless hours fine-tuning some automation / LSP workflow that is going to break when I move to a different project anyway, I just deal with whatever features are missing.
This also has the advantage that I can quickly move to other tools, other languages, other computers, other companies, etc. without requiring days of setup and re-accommodation.
I do have a pretty good memory, which is probably a large part of why this is effective for me.
>> If there is an IDE available that works well out of the box, I'll certainly use whatever automation is available. But often it is broken, incomplete, slow, inaccurate, etc. ...
I think you are unduly harsh here. As a longtime emacs user and who switched to IDE recently (ones that come from JetBrains) my experience hasn't been what you mention. Yes there is a bit of time (not huge) to get adjusted to the shortcuts and efficiently navigate the code, but post that the IDE ecosystem is not as broken as you allude to.
If I'm working on a small hobby project by myself, or some open-source stuff, sure! I agree the Jetbrains stuff is great, I've been using them since 2001 with IntelliJ IDEA.
But most of the large industrial codebases I've worked on at FAANG companies break IDEs one way or another - either because of the build process, or the size of the codebase, etc.