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Does Relying On an IDE Make You a Bad Programmer?
itwbennett writes "Writing about his career decisions, programming language choices, and regrets, Rob Conery says that as a .NET developer he became more reliant on an IDE than he would have with PHP. Blogger, and .NET developer, Matthew Mombrea picks up the thread, coming to the defense of IDEs (Visual Studio in particular). Mombrea argues that 'being a good developer isn't about memorizing the language specific calls, it's about knowing the available ways to solve a problem and solving it using the best technique or tools as you can.' Does using an IDE make you lazy with the language? Would you be better off programming with Notepad?"
I agree. With a good IDE, is easier to discover all the language can do.
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Back in the 80's I wrote a lot of code for my Commodore 64 on paper which I would type in later when the computer was available to me. I was in college a few years ago and was required to take a class on Visual Basic. Everyone is class was new to programming or learned with a fancy IDE. We had a test where we had to write a few routines on paper for a test.
Most students had no idea how to form a line of Visual Basic code. They would just start to type the statement and let IntelliSense give them the proper parameter list and then they would just fill in the blanks. This means they were lazy on if a statement used : or ; or if a variable was one-counter or one_counter or OneCounter. It was a disaster. out of 60 students I was the only one who passed that part of the test.
It is not that I am against IDEs. But having worked without them, and having to do the edit-compile-execute-debug loop, I conceptually understand what the IDE is doing for me. I have done the heavy lifting and I appreciate what the IDE does.
The best way to learn what the language can do, is to set down with a manual that has all of the commands and with simple examples, and read it whenever you are in the bathroom. It is much less boring reading something like this when the only competition is staring at the floor.
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