The IDE As a Bad Programming Language Enabler

theodp writes "When it comes to monolithic IDEs, Wille Faler has lost that loving feeling. In IDEs Are a Language Smell, Faler blogs about a Eureka! moment he had after years of using Eclipse for Java development. 'If the language is good enough,' Faler argues, 'an IDE is strictly not needed as long as you have good support for syntax highlighting and parens matching in the case of Clojure, or indentation in the case of Haskell.' So why do Java coders turn to Eclipse? 'Because [of] a combination of shortcomings in the Java compiler and Java's OO nature,' explains Faler, 'we end up with lots and lots of small files for every interface and class in our system. On any less than trivial Java system, development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing. This nature of Java development requires IDEs to become navigation tools above all.' Yes, only an IDE could love AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean!"

Comments

IDEs are very useful,and it's not language's fault

[coder111]

Well that's bullshit. The biggest problem with development these days is not the language itself, but the 100s of 3rd party mostly-open-source libraries that you have to use. Or else go reinventing the wheel which is worse.

And IDE helps you see the reference for these libraries much easier, using autocomplete and automated documentation lookup. On top of that, navigating your own code is much much easier. Add debuggers and profilers, granted, somewhat less useful in server-side environment but still useful. Semi-automated refactoring though is great, and eclipse does that quite well.

I've done my share of development using nothing more than a text editor. But I prefer to use IDE when I can- they make me much more productive. Of course I still make sure code can be built & deployed using plain command line tools- for Java Maven is great.

--Coder