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The History of Visual Development Environments
Esther Schindler writes "There was a time when programs were written in text editors. And when competition between C++ vendors was actually fierce. Step into the time travel machine as Andy Patrizio revisits the evolution and impact of the visual development metaphor. 'Visual development in its earliest stages was limited by what the PC could do. But for the IBM PC in the early 1980s, with its single-tasking operating system and 8- or 16-bit hardware, the previous software development process was text edit, compile, write down the errors, and debug with your eyes.' Where do you start? 'While TurboPascal launched the idea of an integrated development environment, [Jeff] Duntemann credits Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB), launched in 1991, with being the first real IDE.'... And yes, there's plenty more." A comment attached to the story lists two IDEs that preceded VB; can you name others?
I disagree. The very best are very good at determining the best tool for the job. I'd absolutely hate to attempt to build a database application supposed to run in a windowing environment, with emphasis on UI/user experience, using any of the best text editors.
Why? Because you'd be clueless without an IDE to hold your hand? I'd actually love it. The best way of doing that is to look at the problem from a bird's perspective, concentrate the commonalities in a common runtime (including all sorts of defaults, layout rules etc.), design a tiny declarative language for driving it and use it to design the dialogs and interactions. You might even end up with having a live preview for both native dialogs and their web counterparts, all generated from one source.
I've seen the UI designers available these days and I wasn't impressed. All of them were tightly bound to a single platform. You couldn't even retarget your UI to another widget toolkit.