[ewjordan]

IDE's are good for getting mediocre productivity out of bad programmers.

No, that's what Java is good for.

IDEs are good for maximizing the productivity that any programmer gets out of Java. Otherwise the best Java programmers wouldn't use them.

[axod]

Anecdotal again, but every worthwhile programmer I've known does not use an IDE. But then as I say, a lot of this is semantics. My terminal, and my brain, is my IDE.

[ewjordan]

Anecdotal again, but every worthwhile programmer I've known does not use an IDE.

Not going to touch this other than to note that at Google, IBM, and Sun, most of the Java devs use one of the big 3 (Eclipse, Netbeans, or IntelliJ), you can certainly ask around if you doubt this.

[axod]

I don't really look to big corporations to decide what to use. That was the whole reason I started a company.

Big corporations do things that make sense for big corps. One is to treat programmers like factory workers and have them all use standard coding styles, IDEs, etc. Everyone is just a cog and easily replaceable.

[nollidge]

You're moving the goalposts. Your anecdote specifically related to "worthwhile programmers", not company size. Unless you're prepared to argue that most Google/IBM/etc. coders are not worthwhile?

[Sandman]

Wait, what? Standard coding style is now somehow a bad thing? From your previous comments I can also see that you dislike debuggers? Doing things your way may work if you write small-scale applications, but when you have to work on a large-scale application with several other programmers, there is just no way that you can do that without some coding standards and IDE's debugging and refactoring capabilities. What I really want to say is, look, don't make it sound like all the programmers using IDEs are somehow worse because they use them - they have to maintain large codebases, and without IDEs to help them, they would really have a hard time doing their jobs.