Comment by heresie-dabord
6 months ago
When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment. And possibly to the detriment of the code itself.
> As for terminal IDEs
The GNU/Linux terminal is the killer app. Multiple terminals in a tiling window manager is peak productivity for me. (Browser in a separate virtual workspace.)
And modern scaling for a big display is unbeatable for developer ergonomics.
> When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment.
I think you are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory
Being extremely good at something increases the gap between said something and everything else. That doesn't mean being extremely good at the first thing is "over-specialization to detriment". If someone is equally mediocre at everything, they have no such gap, so no "over-specialization to detriment"; but is that really worth desiring? I think not.
> Being extremely good at something increases the gap between said something and everything else.
You're also potentially over-specializing at one level while at the same time neglecting other levels.
Musicians run into this problem when, for example, they rely solely on muscle memory to make it through a performance. Throw enough stress and complicated music at them and they quickly buckle.
Meanwhile, a more seasoned performer remembers the exact fingers they used when drilling the measure after their mistake, what pitch is in the bass, what chord they are playing, what inversion that chord is in, the context of that chord in the greater harmonic progression, what section of the piece that harmonic progression is in, and so forth.
A friend of mine was able to improvise a different chord progression after a small mistake. He could do this because he knew where he was in the piece/section/chord progression and where he needed to go in the next measure.
In short, I'm fairly certain OP is talking about these levels of comprehension in computer programming. It's fine if someone is immensely comfortable in one IDE and grumpy in another. But it's not so fine if changing a shortcut reveals that they don't understand what a header file is.
What if the IDE is a LeapFrog 2-in-1 Educational Laptop
If you make usable products that solve problems for others from that then it’s a great IDE…
Why is it to their detriment? It's not like they're stuck with it forever. "Can't work without it" is really "won't work without it because they prefer installing it over going without."
As someone that started when only rich people could afford GUIs, I don't understand what is killer app about it.
We used text terminals because that is what we could afford, and I gladly only start a terminal window when I have to.
The killer thing about it is that it is a gateway to the shell, all the command line tooling and the best cross-platform UI.
Xerox PARC, Atari, Amiga and many others had shells, without needing to live on a teletype world.
It is only cross platform as long as it pretends to be a VT100.
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> I gladly only start a terminal window when I have to.
Exactly so. I am perfectly able to work entirely in a text/CLI world, and did for years. I don't becase I don't have to. I have better, richer alternative tools available to me now.
It was very odd to join Red Hat briefly in 2014 and meet passionate Vi advocates who were born after I tried Vi and discarded it as a horrible primitive editor.
Good luck writing Java with notepad.
Tons of people did that but with nvi/vim and calling javac by hand.
We did that back in 1996, however the sentiment applies to most languages.
Example Notepad versus Turbo C++ described on the article.
Was literally a thing in some colleges.