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by erikpukinskis 2777 days ago
I’ve been coding for 20 years. You are correct that some people would speed up in an IDE but it’s more complicated than that. Many people are slowed down by their IDE.

I see IDEs largely as a symptom of the complexity sickness in software development. Companies take a strategy of letting complexity grow to the point where it can’t be controlled. IDEs and other tools for managing massive complexity emerge, because you need such tools to work in codebasses that have become a hurricane of complexity.

There is another path, where you choose to use simpler tools and adapt your plans to fit the tools. This is how the Amish work and they are able to do incredible works and be highly productive.

So, yes. You can try to become like “iron man”, wrapped in tools of immense complexity to match the tasks you set yourself to.

Or you can be like a Japanese carpenter and study and think and refine so that you can do only small tasks, with simple tools, and see miraculous detail emerge from the compounding interest of consistent daily practice.

3 comments

There are features in PyCharm that I have found so, so useful, that I refuse to write Python in anything else.

When Julia and Rust get support that good I’ll never have to use a text editor + plugins again; and I will be very pleased (even though the Rust sublime text plugin is very nice).

The Japanese carpenter has wisdom that allows him to to judge the right level of complexity vs simplicity. But the new generation of developers don’t have that, it’s just ordinary ignorance and is why someone was asking in the article.
Best comment in the whole thread, thanks. Yes, the current tools are just a symptom of the complexity