[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.

[saagarjha]

No, you’re being facetious. GDB and jdb are not comparable at all. jdb is not meant for actual use. This becomes immediately obvious if you spend like ten seconds with it. There’s no readline support, no tab completion, no fancy breakpoints, poor expression evaluation…I can go on and on. GDB has a learning curve but is unquestionably a professional tool that sees heavy use. Similarly, people can make also sorts of spaghetti projects with C(++) but you can also make very nice ones. With Java the state of the art basically requires you to juggle a classpath at all times. You surely know this: all the tools are designed to be driven by automation. Why are you claiming otherwise?