[eropple]

I'm not saying you're bad at programming, I'm saying you're blaming the tools for your lack of discipline. Plenty of good programmers I know are undisciplined. But you can learn, and it's not the tools' fault that you didn't do so before. Hell, I'm a VS2010/Eclipse driver but I write MSBuild scripts by hand and I spent time the other day debugging the make/ant monstrosity. Limiting yourself because it's the only way to make yourself learn what you need to learn may work, but why not just learn it?

(And re: Eclipse--yeah, it's a bit of a hog, but hardware is cheap. Developer time isn't. And the features it provides have no equivalent in vim et al.--just look in the Source dropdown menu for a number of significant productivity enhancers. Those are some of the more minor ones, even; Open Type probably saves me half an hour a day in the monster of a codebase I have to work in. Eclipse is by no means perfect, but it's geared toward reducing boilerplate and stepping on the annoyances involved in Getting Things Done.)

[sigstop]

Most of my peers in school used the same "compile, debug" approach as well. Most of them are still doing it and I can't see any serious software company ever hiring them (there is no shortage of positions for mediocre programmers though, so, they're doing just fine). I don't think this symptom is unique to me and my lack of discipline. As to why I didn't just "learn" to use VS or "learn" to program better? It wasn't for the lack of trying. MSDN was worthless, written documentation (yeah, it was that far back) was worthless and all of the code that other people wrote in VS that I had to interact with was absolutely terrible. It wasn't until I switched my environment until that I got any better. I got more from a man page in an hour than I did from a week of reading MSDN.

As far as Eclipse; I've worked with large codebases and I was faster with vim and knew my APIs better than any of my colleagues who used Eclipse. I heard them complain about Eclipse freezing pretty much daily (as well as doing something wrong when it came to interacting with perforce, often in a devastating way). I know that I Got more things Done than any of them.