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Poll: Is an IDE a necessity?

February 21, 2011, 8:53 PM PST

Takeaway: Some developers consider IDEs abominations, while others say they can’t live without them. What is your take on IDEs? Let us know by taking this poll.

Since I’ve been doing some work with IronRuby, I’ve been looking at a lot of Ruby-related sites. One thing that strikes me is how many people work with Ruby without the benefit of a full-fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Visual Studio or Eclipse. I’ve seen this in a number of other languages as well.

I’ve worked without an IDE, but I’ve always preferred them, if for nothing other than the built-in debugging facilities. I definitely feel that highly complex languages and ecosystems like Java and .NET pretty much require them, while more lightweight systems need them a lot less.

I know some developers who think IDEs are abominations. What’s your opinion of IDEs?

Is an IDE a necessity?

J.Ja

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About Justin James

Justin James is an employee of Levit & James, Inc. in a multidisciplinary role that combines programming, network management, and system administration. He has been blogging at TechRepublic since 2005.

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4 Votes

+ -

Contributr

Choice of tools makes a big difference

Justin James 22nd Feb 2011

A language like Ruby is set up so that integrating the various pieces into one big tool doesn't add much. What a tool could do to help is stuff like Rails-specific syntax highlighting, for example. But "integrating" them would get you little more than what you are doing now... other than the ability to minimize all related windows at once with one click...

But for something like working in .NET, Visual Studio is a necessity for all but the smallest console applications or libraries. There's just too many moving parts, and you have too much dependence on the gigantic .NET Framework itself... no one knows that whole thing. Even C# itself is very dense, the language spec (off topic, the C# spec is surprisingly well written, easy to understand, and may well be one of the best resources to learn the language...) is humongous. Just trying to remember all of the choices in LINQ is overwhelming unless you use it in esoteric ways all day long. A language like Ruby, Perl, Python, F#/OCaml, etc., on the other hand, relies on the developer understanding a few key concepts inside and out, and leveraging them for maximum usefulness. That's a world of difference.

J.Ja

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3 Votes

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Contributr

Yes, there's a big difference

Sterling "chip" Camden 23rd Feb 2011

Between a visual design tool and a visual coding tool, though most IDEs mix the too. I use IDEs for visual design, like arranging the layout of controls on a window. I've even written a considerable number of those kinds of tools over the years. But when it comes to writing code, a visual development environment is not a good match and tends to get in the way. At least, that's my experience.

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3 Votes

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Contributr

Unfortunately...

Justin James 25th Feb 2011

... NetBeans is dropping Ruby support. They claim a lack of interest. I claim it's Oracle trying to stomp on Ruby, now that they control NetBeans.

J.Ja

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1 Vote

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nope

apotheon 30th Mar 2011

I haven't tried it either. I was hoping you could give me a report.

Aside from tab completion in IRC, the shell, and Pentadactyl, I generally don't feel a burning need for autocompletion capabilities, so I haven't taken the time to try Vim's Omni Completion.

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1 Vote

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Contributr

Vim's omnicompletion

Sterling "chip" Camden 30th Mar 2011

I haven't tried it yet, though I saw a link to it somewhere (was it on the FreeBSD questions list?).

My experience with auto-completion in other tools makes me wary of the slow and bothersome. But perhaps vim implements this better than most. Have you tried it?

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2 Votes

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Contributr

Thanks! (NT)

Sterling "chip" Camden 30th Mar 2011

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