[jodrellblank]

> "All these IDE+- things may be nice-to-have but most soon become crutches, and then you cannot live without them, and only walk their walk, not yours."

... and?

Cars have automatic chokes, power assisted steering, hydraulic brakes, airbags, seatbelts, auto-dimming mirrors, self-running wipers, and it's fine. People argue that driving a stick-shift is more authentic but even they use syncromesh and clutches, they don't complain about how rubber tyres are for wimps and they use cartwheel-style metal bands wrapped around wood. They don't complain about having a differential instead of fixed drive to the axel.

A plain editor relies on terminals displaying multiple lines and updating them, filesystems for storage, an OS, a keyboard, ASCII or equivalent, maybe virtual memory management and TUIs and "then you can't live without them"! (scream emoji). But so what, it's not a problem, nobody seriously programs on punched cards because they don't want to become dependent on screens and keyboards.

You can make a case that artisan craftsman furniture is better quality than Ikea furniture but that's not because the artisan avoids factory machinery and uses hand tools, it's that the artisan spends more time and effort and takes longer (and needs to charge a lot more money). If you want to make the case that the artisan shouldn't use tape-measures, laser levels, power sanders, power saws, dust masks, wood glue, clamps, they should use a pencil behind the ear, a thumb's width and a handsaw because that's how they learn the True Nature of Wood(tm) then maybe you're just posturing and gatekeeping, or have some sort of Amish-style religion.

Calling power tools 'crutches' is so you can imply that people who use them have disabled themselves. Instead it's like saying people who commute 20 miles to work in a car are using the car as a crutch because you can just walk 5 hours each way and that's more real. It's embarassing that people are so desperately trying to claim both "I don't use power tools because power tools are for weak babies and I'm a STRONG MAN" and in the same breath "my editor can do everything an IDE can do, it isn't inferior, it is a power tool!".

> "Just turning off syntax coloring freaks recent developers.. even quite good ones.."

Just turning off thermometer and oven temperature controls freaks recent cooks ... even quite good ones. Are you going to make the case that restaurants would be better if all cooks worked like your grandma with a log fire who had learned the right feel of heat for bread, cake, or roasts? No? Because that's obviously silly? But what if those developers one day in 2025 find themselves on a monochrome screen, with no shades of gray and no underlines or italics and no option to buy an alternative, hah what then?! Isn't that obviously also silly? NB. you didn't remove paragraphs or punctuation or capital letters from your comment, maybe you're just not a good writer and need these assistive crutches?

[camgunz]

You're erecting a pretty detailed strawman here. It's not that "raw dogging" code makes you a better developer; it's that specifically jump-to-definition and autocomplete make it too easy to create code bases that may as well be huge bags of functions and classes, and that skipping the mental work of organizing the code limits the fidelity of the mental model you can build.

[adambatkin]

Programming languages are complicated. Their standard libraries are extensive. Real world application are usually not trivial, because they often model real world processes, and the real world is messy.

Anything we can do to make writing software easier and more reliable, and reduce cognitive load, is going to benefit the software developers who are involved, and will make the systems better.

I'm sorry, if you can't jump-to-definition then you are wasting the company's time. It's something that all developers need to do and there's no reason we should be wasting time navigating a codebase when what you are looking for can be found instantly.

Same with autocomplete. I can type very fast, but autocomplete can type faster. Plus with the size of most APIs (even the ones built in to most programming languages) I have better things to spend brain space on. Is it list.empty(), clear(), empty(), truncate() or something else? With autocomplete I can find the function in want in 3 seconds (and read the docs inline, so I can tell that empty() doesn't empty the list, it tells me whether or not the list is empty) without lifting my fingers off my keyboard. Should I remember which is which? Maybe, but I don't care, and a jump between languages frequently enough that it's not worth the effort to keep track of silly things like that That's a contrived example, but hopefully you get the point.

[camgunz]

We're SWEs; the temptation to min/max ourselves is quite high. And it's not a bad impulse! I'm a Vim user; I've obviously invested a lot of time in editing efficiency (e.g. I'm great at looking up docs in the terminal). Oftentimes when I need to code I can't dilly dally. I also prefer a style of dumping out an implementation as quickly as possible to prove/disprove the idea, which of course requires a lot of editing efficiency.

But the way I've gotten here is by assiduously removing things that slowed me down. Sure popping docs in your editor is faster than switching to a browser, but just remembering is even faster. If your goal is really to not "waste the company's time" then you're putting the standard library, your dependencies, your app, etc. into Anki and memorizing. Since almost nobody (some people are and bless them) is doing this, I think we should admit we're fully in the realm of personal aesthetic preferences here.

And I take a broader view of the whole thing besides. I start from the perspective that engineers are whole people with histories, futures, goals, features, interests, and opinions. For example, Go wasn't built with autocomplete and go to definition. You're more or less arguing that Rob Pike should've been forced to setup VSCode. I think that's an express ticket to pissing off and burning out your engineers; just like I'd never micromanage Pike to that degree, I'd never micromanage you to the point where I'd force you to learn Acme.

The value we bring to our companies isn't just the speed with which we crank out code. The value our companies give to us isn't just a salary and benefits. We have more nuanced and complex human needs, and sacrificing those for extreme coding efficiency may provide short-term gains, but the long-term effect is pretty grim (ponder for a moment working at a company that actually cares about efficiency to the degree they'll micromanage your editing workflow).

[UltraSane]

I find it so ironic that a surprisingly large fraction of computer programmers are such curmudgeonly Luddites spurning the most basic tools that make their job easier. Meanwhile engineers are using Solidworks to model mechanism that would be nearly or actually impossible to create without it and then running a finite element analysis to verify it is strong enough and using selective laser sintering to create prototypes for testing and then using MasterCAM to optimize the machining process and then sending it to a $300,000 5 axis milling machine with automated tool changer. Then the part's dimensional tolerances are verified using a $200,000 Coordinate Measuring Machine that is calibrated using gauge blocks made using laser interferometry and accurate to plus or minus a few hundred atoms.

[croes]

It hard to cook without knowing the temperature, it’s not that hard to code without syntax highlighting.

In your examples white on smoke white text would be the better analogy

[card_zero]

> If you want to make the case that the artisan shouldn't use tape-measures, laser levels, power sanders, power saws, dust masks, wood glue, clamps, they should use a pencil behind the ear, a thumb's width and a handsaw because that's how they learn the True Nature of Wood(tm) then maybe you're just posturing and gatekeeping, or have some sort of Amish-style religion.

Or you're William Morris, who was kind of ridiculous and pretentious, but was making a valid point at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement