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I wrote Java for multiple years in vim with no extensions installed.

I don’t think that is smart

I was more productive than I suspect someone with just an IDE would have been, considering the volume of complex non-coding issues I needed to learn about and solve.

How does spending your time learning about things an IDE would have avoided make you "more productive"? That's a pretty clear cut argument that you were less productive as you were doing things manually a tool would have automated. Thereby spending time being unproductive.

Because an IDE doesn't always (or even usually) avoid those things, and I don't consider learning time to be unproductive if it means in the future I'm more productive.

It's a pretty clear cut argument that using an IDE as a crutch will inevitably bite you in the ass, and if you want the best possible understanding of the language you're using and all of its related tools you ought not use an IDE as it obfuscates those very things you're trying to learn about.

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