[TeMPOraL]

The productivity argument can be had about using an IDE vs. not using any at all. But it doesn't really work to explain how the IDEs get larger and slower while not offering commensurate gains in productivity (and arguably, being slower creates a loss in productivity).

[g_p]

Agreed. I'd be interested in knowing if the perceived slowness is due to the number of layers of abstraction involved in aspects of the build process, that might also be used in the IDE figuring out what to include.

I remember when "android" IDE was a plugin for eclipse... Now it seems to be a deeply integrated plugin for IntelliJ, coupled with an infinitely more complex build system (gradle), that has a fairly high fixed overhead to run for anything, and which seems to need to download 100 MB worth of code from a server for itself.

Maybe we need to try get back to overall system designs where one good engineer can have the full design in their head? I suspect the slowness of the IDE has something to do with the complexity of the tooling, and the need to call the native tooling to figure out include paths, to enable features like search or finding definitions. But surely it shouldn't be this bad?