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Ask Slashdot: Correlation Between Text Editor and Programming Language?

Posted by Soulskill on from the fortran-and-a-stack-of-recycled-construction-paper dept.

tyggna writes: "The flame wars of different shells and text editors have long been established, but my question is this: are text editors and various languages linked? Do the majority of Ruby programmers use Emacs? Are most Perl programmers using vim?

Please post your editor and language of choice in the comments."

5 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, sure.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Some editors are more useful or even custom tailored for specific languages or functional areas, and naturally people who use those languages or work in those areas tend to gravitate towards them.

    Some languages (like java) are almost unusable without one of several popular editors, which deal with a lot of the boilerplate and let you navigate around the kind of "a million small pieces" type code you get with java. You can code java in vim if you want to, but working on a large java project with vim is probably not a common practice (I'm sure several counter-examples will be provided below).

    Apple is probably the king of the designated editor group, with microsoft coming in at a close second. These are relatively closed stacks and have purpose built (and pretty decent) tools to work with them, so most people do.

    And then some languages (scripting languages, c/c++) are edited commonly with just about everything.

    Outside specific editor features designed with a specific language in mind, or tools which require a specific editor, I don't think anything drives someone to use one generic editor over another one of similar capability. People chose vim vs emacs for non-language specific reasons (for example: number of attached hands).

    Also this is a really lame question. Does anyone really care about editor flame wars any more? People use what they like, what works, or what they are mandated to.

    1. Re:Uh, sure.. by 1s44c · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think we should close the comments here. The parent covered all the important points.

    2. Re:Uh, sure.. by DataPath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Obviously false.

      Emacs comes with a built-in psychoanalyst - a critical feature for any experienced developer. Especially one using Emacs.

      Visual Studio lacks such a feature, so the logical conclusion is that developers using Visual Studio are simply inexperienced.

      Although, to be fair, Emacs isn't properly an IDE, it's an OS that comes with IDE features.

      --
      Inconceivable!
  2. OK by slapout · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Please post your editor and language of choice in the comments."

    O'Reilly and English

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    Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
  3. C/C++/Java/Ruby/Python and I use.... by RedHackTea · · Score: 5, Funny

    Quill pen on papyrus. I have a dedicated typist to re-type all of it when I'm done into whatever editor it chooses. I also have a stenographer for when my hand gets tired. I never get compilation errors.

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    The G