[blakeyrat]

When you say "IDE" you're probably meaning something like Visual Studio. Ok, fair enough.

Now think about something like HyperCard. That's an IDE. It's eminently usable and learnable (even friendly), and yet still does all the things an IDE does.

"IDE" doesn't have to be Visual Studio. There have been friendly IDEs in the past, and there's no reason they couldn't be built today except nobody's doing it. There's actually a nasty trend in software development right now that can be summarized as "they're programmers; they don't need usability or discoverability". Look at Git for an example. Ugh. This trend can not die quickly enough for me.

[cbd1984]

I find git extremely usable, and I despise IDEs that hide anything from me.

Every hidden thing is a thing that, when it goes wrong, I can't fix. Something "goes wrong" when it's either not working as designed, or it's broken as designed and needs to be reconfigured or otherwise changed: The IDE handles the wrong language, for example, and needs to use a different compiler and have different highlighting and formatting rules.

IDEs that only handle one language are beneath contempt.

[nickpinkston]

Sounds like you're a power user, not a novice.

[cbd1984]

> Sounds like you're a power user, not a novice.

Smile when you say that. ;)

"Power user", to me, means someone who knows a lot of trivia about specific software but no underlying theory; none of their knowledge transfers to any other system, so their domain knowledge is constantly being obsoleted. Having some power user traits is inevitable and desirable, but being just a power user is a stage you should strive to outgrow.

I admit that that's just a knee-jerk reaction based on my idiosyncratic definitions.

[learning_still]

I completely agree with you. This problem with IDEs is not in the concept but in the way in which it is most often executed.