[jrockway]

I made a vow to myself to never reply to a comment that used both "tactics" and "strategy" in the same sentence, but here goes...

Why should programming be any different? The very best IDEs in the hands of a skilled programmer should produce code better than a similarly skilled programmer who insists on using a dumb text editor. If the resulting code can only effectively be modified by a similar computer/human team - well that's a small price to pay.

That's true, but show me an IDE that lets someone write better code than someone without the IDE. The reality is that IDEs provide very superficial features that help beginners be more productive, but don't help experienced programmers much. (The most cited feature, symbol completion with docstrings, is available in pretty much every text editor. It's nice confirmation that your mental model matches the tags table, but hardly essential.)

All I can say is: Java got a lot easier for me when I stopped trying to make Eclipse useful. It turns out that Eclipse doesn't really do anything except sleep(5) after every keystroke.

[eliasmacpherson]

The speed and manner in which the full version of Visual Studio allows you to debug container objects and jump JIT to the code currently executing to look at the call stack and inspect variable values, is not superficial. As a text editor, code writing tool, sure it's not much better than a standard editor. As an IDE with a debugger it allows an experienced developer to debug faster and write better code more quickly. Even experienced developers have to debug their code, and it is time consuming even for them.

Eclipse is not Visual Studio though I've heard good things about IntelliJ IDEA.

[edwinnathaniel]

Visual Studio is not Eclipse either.

IntelliJ is on par with Eclipse. Period. Let us put a stop into that topic.

[arcdrag]

The refactoring tools in IntelliJ make it possible to catch a lot of things that would be very difficult to do with emacs of vim. For example, I know a certain utility method exists in several different classes, so I want to extract that method and utilize it throughout my project. The IDE will search the project for any block of code that meets this pattern and will ask you if you want to replace it with this new utility class instead. For smaller projects (<25k LOC) this isn't a big deal, as any major dev will have seen every line of code. For very large projects, I can't imagine going back.

Also, if you're basing your IDE experience solely on Eclipse and Netbeans, give IntelliJ a try. Both Eclipse and Netbeans pretty much seem unusable after you use IntelliJ for a while.

[jrockway]

I don't think "very large" means what you think it means :) I work on a codebase that recently passed commit number 30,000,000. I don't know how many lines of code that ends up being, but it's a lot :)

Basically, my experience with IDEs at Google is that none of them can handle our repository. Even managing the transitive closure of a single project, Eclipse randomly freezes while typing. I don't know anyone that uses Eclipse anymore. Most of my team uses IntelliJ, but even then, the codebase is just too big for it. People type something like com.google.commons.collect.L and see no results (when the right answer is "Lists"). I haven't debugged this, since I don't have any interest in using IntelliJ, but the number of times a day I'm brought to someone's desk to "watch this", I don't think it would work for me. I'd rather have consistent limitations than random failures. Emacs won't iterate over every Java file in Google's repository to complete "Lists" as above, but if I've used it in another file, it will.

The good news is, we have an internal code indexing system that provides an RPC API for many of the IDE features, including completion and duplicate code detection. (But most of the Java chores that people love their IDEs for are handled in other ways at Google. I don't think I've ever written a getter or setter, for example, because every class I've written has been immutable with private internal state. When your objects aren't dumping grounds for other objects, you don't need to get or set anything! :)

Like I've said in other comments, I would never do Java outside of Google. But since I'm here, I have nice tools available to me and using Emacs for Java is no problem at all.

[bradleyjg]

The great-grand parent's original point was that a language that needs tools to be written effectively is a flawed language. If I diverted that into a meaningless argument about what type of tools are best, then I apologize.

I stand by my original point though. I wouldn't want to write in any programming language without tooling and the availability of sophisticated tooling (of many different styles) for a given language is a strength not a weakness.