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Comment by ninjakeyboard | Hacker News Reader

You're working with statically typed compiled languages tho. Once you try using a dynamic language you realize another editor is enough IMO. I use emacs for anything dynamically typed (including compiled languages like elixir) and intellij for scala/java.

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Webstorm or PyCharm isn't as good as IntelliJ or ReSharper, but holy hell is it better than just a text editor, even emacs.

I really don't understand why so many programmers proudly proclaim that they do things the hard way and wear that as a badge of honor.

That's an old, old trope. "Real men" do it the way that takes 3X as long and yields code with more bugs.

I feel like "tool use" follows roughly the same curve as a Gartner Hype Cycle, but without an upper bound on the right (as it implies a below-peak asymptote).

In the very beginning, less is often better, since the tool is prompting you with too many things you don't understand. Then you get past that point and you're massively more productive, since it's catching all your simple mistakes. Then you become disillusioned since it doesn't catch all mistakes, and you start learning in detail how it has failed you, and you just (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ the whole thing (the "real man" trough). And in the end you go back to sophisticated tools, as you realize a 70% solution can still give you magnitudes more productivity.

But the tooling on emacs or whatever is up to par. That was my original point, not that a plain text editor is a real man's way, just that it's good enough. PyCharm or whatnot isn't necessarily much better than what you can do in emacs, but it isn't portable to other languages or as flexible. A text editor like vi or emacs isn't much different than an IDE's functionality when looking at a dynamic language. It's a WHOLE DIFFERENT WORLD with scala though (IMO - that's arguable but refactorings etc aren't on parity with intellij), and I don't foresee myself ditching intellij for scala dev any time soon.

I remember showing a scala developer who was using sublime the "extract method" feature and some refactorings in intellij and he was like "HOW DOES IT KNOW ABOUT THE CODE THOUGH???" - the IDEs have great features, but they're less differentiating for dynamic languages as a lot of the OSS tools are just as good. Eg VS Code MS Python extension for example. It's just great.

Phpstorm compared to vim is like an oceanside resort compared to a walk in the desert without a water bottle. If there's not thousands of bugs I have prevented or discovered thanks to phpstorm, I am not surprised.

Jetbrains products are absolutely critical if you're using a dynamic, uncompiled language and to turn down the offer is professional misconduct even if it requires buying a new computer with more ram. I don't know who thought it's a good idea to pretend that a typo in one use of a variable is a legitimate expression of developer intent, but Jetbrains saves your users from that hell.

It's miles better on Python and most javascript that I've touched (VSCode's ecosystem does tend to have more breadth, and if you're working on something that VSCode has plugins for but Intellij does not, yea - VSCode can be noticeably better for most purposes). Most commonly around stuff that requires better understanding of the structure of the language / project, like refactoring and accurately finding usages.

But yes, for many dynamic languages a fat IDE is less beneficial, especially for small-ish projects (anything where you can really "know" the whole system).

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