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by bobmaxup 900 days ago
Maybe it boils down to how well you are able to navigate a code base.

With a full-featured language specific IDE, it is very easy to navigate through even complicated spaghetti. It makes debugging call traces simple, with a GUI.

However, many other file viewers and editors make this much more complicated, and it can be frustrating to follow code that is making heavy use of modularization.

If you are grepping your way through a deeply modular code base it can quickly become difficult to keep track of anything.
1 comments
phkahler 900 days ago
>> With a full-featured language specific IDE, it is very easy to navigate through even complicated spaghetti.

If you need a fancy IDE to navigate around code in order to understand it, that might be crappy or poorly organized code.

Not a dig at nice IDEs, just code that requires one to navigate and understand.

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chongli 900 days ago
Yeah. This is one of those hammer cases. If you’ve got a fancy IDE then the temptation is to use it. Similar to the issue of game programmers being given top of the line gaming PCs with frequent upgrades. They then struggle to understand why the game they just released runs like crap on most people’s modest computers.
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bobmaxup 899 days ago
Not many people can understand a very large code base without taking notes, using an IDE, or similar tooling.

> Not a dig at nice IDEs, just code that requires one to navigate and understand

A nice IDE helps you reason about code, no matter what the underlying architecture is. That is why there is a market for them.

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