[jhancock]

"We haven't met a single great hacker that relied on an IDE, although we hear they exist."

Sounds like GiraffeSoft folks don't use languages with type info and a graphical debugger. I certainly wish TextMate could handle static info and had a JVM debugger. I would love to code scala in TextMate.

The IDEs are too heavy. I don't like them. But if you want/need a debugger and type info for refactoring and exploration, you don't have much choice.

The other three items they list seem on target. The one about great coders don't use IDEs is highly dependent on what language and kind of code your writing.

[Zak]

Without getting in to what those preferences are, that being a different can of worms, I think it's likely that there are trends in the language preferences of great hackers. The existence of these trends means that tools that work well with the languages great hackers prefer will be more popular with great hackers.

The static analysis done by heavy IDEs isn't the only way to have large amounts of information about code available in the editor. Using Emacs with Slime, the editor has a huge amount of information about your code because it's communicating with the Lisp runtime that's evaluating it.