What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

The author reflects on why development with an IDE is not that useful. In effect, it creates a local maximum that can trap you into thinking it’s a global maximum.

In effect, as my friend experienced in his coding class, these sorts of things don’t make better programs and don’t make us better programmers. We end up knowing less than we should and get less than we deserve.

I’ve never warmed to IDEs myself. I’ve typically found them too constraining and wanting to take over all of my development workflow at once: How I setup my project, how I declare dependencies, how I setup my tests, how I compile my code. It feels like an all or nothing affair. I’ve long1 preferred a programmer’s editor: Syntax highlighting, code navigation, and the ability to automate when I want it.

That Wild Ask A Manager Story

This article references a story that was new to me: The person interviewed is not the same person that shows up for work. This author’s takeaway is interesting. Instead of overreacting, he would do nothing:

The premise here is simple: designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.

  1. Last century, my editor of choice was Edit++. Except for the command palette, it’s capabilities are not that different than Atom, my preferred editor today. ↩