[nostrademons]

Well, it's more "Core competencies of hackers in the C/C++/UNIX/Scripting/Web tradition."

Most of the great Windows hackers I know use Visual Studio. Most of the great Java hackers use IntelliJ. Of course, people in the UNIX/web tradition would probably not admit that great hackers exist in those cultures, but they've put out some pretty impressive software...

Also - I suspect that great UNIX/web hackers don't use IDEs because the IDEs for those languages suck. I work on a C++ web team. If you glance around our monitors, everyone has the same setup: 4-6 terminals, 3-5 emacs/vim windows open, and Firefox. The funny thing is, many of us are ex-Java programmers, and we all used either IntelliJ or Eclipse in our Java programming days. And would love to use something like IntelliJ for C++, but we took one look at the C++ support in Eclipse and ran back to vim.

[curtis]

As a data point, I have Firefox building under Eclipse/C++ reasaonably well. I had to hack the Eclipse project files to tell it where all the headers were (arguably more a fault of the Mozilla build system), but since then it's worked surprisingly well. I'm under the impression that Eclipse's C++ support had improved substantially in the last year, although I can't say for sure, since this was the first time I'd used it.