Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hughw 4053 days ago
Well, first of all, I am not against IDEs. I use one most days of the week, and I'm productive in it. Some of the above discussion has misinterpreted my remarks. I only ever said, that a language making itself amenable to IDEs isn't a convincer for me, since languages requiring tooling to be effective are possibly less good as languages. So when somebody tells me Typescript is good because IDEs can autocomplete it, it's an unconvincing argument to me, since I prefer JavaScript which, having no type annotations, has less typing and little need for autocomplete in the first place.

I didn't even bring up environment flexibility, or terminals!

Since you asked, though, it is fairly nice to be able to ssh in to a box and make a code change, and recompile, for those languages that require that. Continuing with Scala as an example, I, myself, could not edit a Scala program extensively without benefit of an IDE. So say I have a Scala program sitting on a dev server where I'm building a batch image processing program. If Scala were as simple as Jacascript, I could easily use vi or emacs to iterate the development remotely. As it is, I edit and test locally on my laptop using an IDE, then push this big jar over to the server. So, there are plenty of cases where remote edit, compile, test cycle using a terminal is convenient.