Ask HN: What modern “legendary” programmer prefers IDE other than Vim or Emacs?
By "modern" I mean, started programming around a time when emacs, vim AND other (e.g. Visual Studio) were available to choose from
If “legendary programmers” all chiseled bits into a disk with a scalpel would that make it a good idea?
Use whatever makes you comfortable and allow others to do the same. Don’t emulate or even care about “legendary programmers” tooling.
They are olympians, you're not. Use whatever shoes you want to use.
Tooling does matter, but what "legendary programmers" tooling looks like doesn't outside of a professional curiosity.
Linus Torvalds has used a janky version of micro Emacs that he picked up as a university student in Finland.[1] Will it make you a better programmer if you switch to his editor? No. Just use whatever you are comfortable with, like he has. He has used this editor because he got used to its peculiar keybindings. He rather worked on the kernel than to learn new keybindings.
25 years ago I was using a mix of Visual Studio and Emacs. 25 years later I use Emacs a bit but don’t write much code. I use BBEdit more than Emacs now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePZEkbbf3fc
Bio:
> My name is Kamil Dębowski (or Errichto) and I'm quite good at competitive programming. I'm a finalist of multiple big programming competitions like ICPC, Facebook Hacker Cup and Google Code Jam (even got 2nd place in 2018). I also organize competitions, which means inventing and preparing problems.
Not sure if they still use Geany, or if you consider this person legendary (some people really gatekeep around words like that), but there's at least a data point for you.
For example, I use Far Manager/Kate for competitive programming and small scripts (sometimes Vim), but not way I use any of these for professional development.
No professional IDEs almost certainly (no license to use), and the set of free IDEs depends on what organizers like: some installed NetBeans, some installed Eclipse CDT, some did both, some did neither.
No external resources like configs and plugins are typically allowed either.
Of course, it depends on a competition. I'm mostly talking about IOI (International Olympiad in Informatics for school students) and ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest). Online competitions are another beast.