[whirlycott1]

The java language is actually very small and easy to remember. The standard library, on the other hand, is huge. If there's any glory in remembering what the constructor arguments are for a certain class, it's lost on me.

Plus, in the real world, many of us use what we call "third party code" which could be as simple as something as a database driver or some kind of utility class. If you think you're going to remember perfectly everything all the time, then you are dreaming.

And on refactoring: if you don't think it's essential, please do yourself a favor and find someone who can give you a tutorial. Refactoring is the key feature of all of these IDEs.

Say you have 100K lines of code in a project. You want to move a class to a new package. In your world, you spend a week doing it and probably typing javac over and over on the command line. In my world, I can do it in less than 5 seconds and know the IDE is 100% correct. When you have power like that in an easily accessible frontend, you tend to use it. That benefits your code by making the big ugly maintenance tasks into afterthoughts.

[silentOpen]

> In your world, you spend a week doing it and probably typing javac over and over on the command line.

Perhaps you should learn to use the command line if you think refactoring without an IDE takes a week. :-/

[trapper]

How long would it take you to refactor say an entire package hierarchy in an open source project like jfreechart? Id love to see a video of how this happens as evidence.