[stickfigure]

The IDE is Java's biggest strength, and it matters.

I've worked with plenty of engineers who are absolute masters of vim and emacs; their fingers fly on the keyboard. It looks impressive but even the best of these people look like rank amateurs compared to the people who have spent equivalent time mastering IDEA or Eclipse. With a good IDE the code practically writes itself. This is a real productivity gain, and needs to be considered as part of the value proposition of the language/environment.

[heavenlyblue]

I think vim/emacs vs. IDE debate is similar to that playing shooters on console vs. desktop: there's no way a joystick (a control with relative position control) could be replaced with a mouse (a control with an absolute position control) with no loss of functionality.