[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Since he didn’t have suggestions to guide him, he read the docs and by simply perusing them, was aware of methods and other features that the IDE did not suggest.

This post reminded me of the story of Mel.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

So Mel, not only did not use IDEs, he did not use compilers, or even an assembler because they got in his way of deep knowledge of the instruction set of the computer as well as the performance characteristics of the hardware he was programming.

Because of that, he was able to achieve program efficiency in both space and time that others could only dream of.

The "real programmers" don't do X, trope has been going of since before most of the people of this forum were even born.

This is just another manifestation of this trope.

[greiskul]

And Mel is a great story, but it is also misses that engineering is about tradeoffs. And in many, many programs, space and time efficiency is actually way, way less important than maintainability, extensibility, etc. There will always be the cases where deep knowledge of the fundamentals of computers and computer science will make or break a program. But for a large part of most programs, premature optimization is still the root of all evil.