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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Definitely a no-brainer. Always buy the best machine you can get.

I'm surprised that most developers don't take the same approach to tools. If you're using Eclipse or (god forbid) a text editor to write code, spend a minute and tally up all those 5-second chunks of your life you've spent this year looking up the names of variables, objects, whatever, and running into runtime errors from typos. Multiply by $$$/hour and see what you could have spent on a decent IDE.

JetBrains makes IDEs for pretty much every language out there by now, and any one of them will pay for itself in about four days.

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"Best machine you can get" would often be overkill. Consider the "best" on the Apple Store today: a 12-core Mac Pro with RAID and 2 27" Apple Cinema displays, you're looking at more than $12,000. And unless you're overflowing in VC cash like it was 1999 it would be insane from a business point of view to equip every developer with this kind of hardware.

By the way many folks are highly productive using a text editor to write code. They might start off slower but end up actually learning the language and libraries they are using. IDEs that step in and try to take over while I'm typing drive me insane.

Back to the primary topic, certainly it's a false savings to skimp out on buying an adequate machine for the task, but for most devs who spend most of their time in an IDE or editor, something like buying last year's best is often completely adequate and much more economical. To expect the "best machine you can get" without regard for cost is not realistic.

> If you're using Eclipse or (god forbid) a text editor to write code, spend a minute and tally up all those 5-second chunks of your life you've spent this year looking up the names of variables, objects, whatever, and running into runtime errors from typos. Multiply by $$$/hour and see what you could have spent on a decent IDE.

This is a bit of FUD. There are plugins for most text editors that give them features that most IDEs have. For example, my Vim setup has tab and code completion, snippet management, syntax error highlighting in real time, code folding, document and file search, etc. I can also traverse a file faster in Vim than an IDE, my fingers do not ever need to leave the keyboard, and it's completely free (as in beer and freedom).

I use Vim and don't really need all the fancy code/whatever completion things, but how on earth do you get them? It seems complicated enough that I haven't bothered.

It's not to difficult, There are a ton of plugin's listed on the Vim site, and some on github. Most of them are just dropped into your .vim directory and some need to be set to startup in your .vimrc. Command-T(this one can acutally be kind of a pain to setup if your vim was not compiled with Ruby support), SuperTab, SnipMate are the three I recommend the most.

Thank you, I'll give them a shot now.

For something like on-the-fly highlighting of syntax errors it's usually just as easy as downloading the plugin and dropping it into your ~/.vim/ folder. For more some things you might have the extra step of having to remember a new command or keybinding, but that's about as complicated as it gets.

Emacs users should check out the flymake minor-mode.

ctrl-( p previous or n for Next) is built in auto-completion of what you are typing. It can be configured to use tags, files, only open buffers etc.

Ah, I do use that (rarely). I was looking for something more intelligent that might perhaps help with development, rather than with just typing.

You might want to look into Tags. They tend to be what gives vim its ide powers.

I'm a hard-core emacs devotee since 1988, and I used to think the same way- who needs freakin' autocomplete? But a good friend made me try one out, and indeed, a decent IDE really does make a big difference in certain environments.

For example, being able to click through an entire app from Spring XML config, all the way through your own source code, into library files, and even the source for the JRE makes a huge, huge difference in productivity.

And languages/libraries/frameworks change all the time; the IDEs tend to follow these things closely. Having to maintain your own hand-crafted elisp (or whatever) takes a lot of work. I've been there, and I don't plan on going back any time soon.

For some reason, I use IDEs for Java and emacs for everything else. The only other area I find emacs lacking is web pages that mix languages (e.g. HTML/Javscript).

If you're using Eclipse or (god forbid) a text editor to write code, spend a minute and tally up all those 5-second chunks of your life you've spent this year looking up the names of variables, objects, whatever

Nope, i love my text editor and i see no reason to start using an IDE. I've used IDEs before and they're all monolithic, slow, bloated tools that slow me down and make my life harder[1].

[1] Hi! I'm <strike>clippy</strike> Netbeans. It looks like you're trying to write a program. Can i autocomplete your words wrong, reformat your text in ways that don't make sense or follow your formatting guidelines and then crash?

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