[commandlinefan]

> check if your backspace key still works.

Back in the late 90's, when Java was still sort of new, my employer insisted that I install an IDE to do my Java development that I had been doing mostly in vi. The one they picked (for some reason) was Symantec's Visual Cafe. I found that I could reliably, reproducibly, crash the IDE by pressing the backspace key. Maybe that was their way of pushing a "no mistakes" philosophy?

[hinkley]

In that era no IDE ran stable across its whole feature set. Crashing debuggers were very common. VisualAge had the most stable debugger but would crash just typing in code.

Jetbrains was the first one that was reliable. Slow, but not as slow as VA.