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by martinced 4989 days ago
Editor war!

You are confusing non-expressive languages like C# and Java which needs lots of "refactoring" and lots of boilerplate code (hence the need for code generators which understand "patterns" and refactoring tools etc.) with "productive languages", for a start.

Then your point is moot anyway: since quite some time there are vim programmers using an Eclipse bridge and getting the Eclipse features right from inside vim (it's called "eclim") and there's, of course, a port to Emacs ("emacs-eclim") which, despite only being used by a few people, works quite well (I'm using it and getting the best of both world and for when I do really need to something inside that piece of underperforming bloat that Eclipse is, I can just switch to it in a heartbeat).

But anyway, even without these Eclipse bridges, if you do really think that someone using, say, Visual Studio to develop C# code is more productive than a programmer using Emacs to develop Clojure code I'd like to have some of the stuff you're smoking because it looks good ; )

To me the biggest issue with Eclipse / Visual Studio / IntelliJ is that their "text editor" part is really terrible.

In addition to that, programmers do craft tools to make their life easier : to me it's only logical that a programmer would want to be able to program his editor.

I suggest to take a look at the "Emacs rocks!" series on YouTube to get a feel of what's possible using Emacs.

To me a good example of a productive programmer using Emacs would be Rich Hickey. He created the Lisp dialect Clojure and then he went on to create an amazing DB (Datomic) using Clojure. He knows about productivity...

Now of course if you're stuck in the C#/NHibernate/SQL hell working on apps full of mutability and where it's close to impossible to reproduce state, I do understand why you feel Visual Studio would be better. But I do really your ability to "move fast" compared to people using more advanced technologies and who are not stuck in the "design pattern" / ORM mindset...

4 comments

> non-expressive languages like C#

C# is a quite expressive language in my opinion. And i'm quite versed in Clojure, which seems to be your language of predilection. It does have limited type inference and lambdas, which makes it a lot less painful than Java.

It really depends on the problem you have at hand anyway. But even if you have a problem where you need a more functional approach, with immutable data structures, you can use F#, which is an amazing language.

> But anyway, even without these Eclipse bridges, if you do really think that someone using, say, Visual Studio to develop C# code is more productive than a programmer using Emacs to develop Clojure code I'd like to have some of the stuff you're smoking because it looks good ; )

I use Visual Studio to develop C# code. I use Eclipse if i have to code Scala. I use emacs if i have to clojure, i actually used it to develop Clojurescript's Lua backend. Most of them have good vim bindings anyway, but in emacs i prefer to use emacs.

C# with Visual Studio can be the most productive of languages, provided the good use case. And you sound like you know nothing about what you're talking about.

I can really recommend Evil mode for Vim goodness in Emacs!

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

look at a Stream/Recording of Minecraft creator Notch writing game code in Eclipse and i bet you will think twice before sniffing at IDEs like Eclipse in that way again.

  > Editor war!
Please don't.
Downvoted because I'm not entirely sure what point this is addressing, and really, people have preferences for editors.

So fucking what if someone has the audacity to eschew vim/emacs/ed/acme/pen and paper in favour of a nice IDE they're familiar and productive with? You don't get any geek-cred for using any editor over the alternatives.