[pjmlp]

IDE productivity, and it started with Smalltalk and Lisp Machines, was adopted by C++, Visual Basic and Delphi, among several 4GLs, several years before Java was invented.

Everyone is free to use Java in vi with make, if they feel happy doing so.

In fact, there were hardly any Java IDEs when the language was released in 1996, which were quickly provided by Smalltalk, Delphi and C++ vendors.

[saagarjha]

Java is somewhat unique in how annoying the typical project is to work on without an IDE.

[pjmlp]

All languages are annoying to use without IDEs, unless we are talking about toy implementations.

I became an XEmacs user in 1995, because everything else in UNIX just sucked in comparison with PC, Mac OS and Amiga IDEs of the time.

[saagarjha]

I've worked on plenty of projects where I can navigate around in a pretty dumb text editor and run "make" and things mostly work. In Java land most things are several folders deep and things are injected in from places I don't understand without tooling to show me what is going on. I mean, have you tried using jdb? It basically exists as an advertisement for an integrated debugger.

[pjmlp]

That is what many call gdb as well, so it isn't far off.

As for messy code navigation, I have similar experiences in large C codebases, so maybe C is also unusable without IDEs.

[saagarjha]

Yeah, no.

[pjmlp]

Yeah, mostly surely yes, specially offshoring stuff.