In Praise of Low Tech DevEx

There are only three major features (aside from things like syntax highlighting and indent guides) that make me reach for an IDE:

  1. Intellisense
  2. Linters
  3. Code analysis

All three of which help me improve my own skills, as I don’t just use them blindly. I consciously analyze why they were triggered so as to determine if their suggestions are valid in that use case, and to become familiar with what they are suggesting to remember it in the future.

It’s not that I hate steep learning curves. I just don’t like counterproductively difficult steep learning curves. Send me up the side of a metaphorical mountain, and I will be fine with that so long as I have the metaphorical ropes and carabiners and pitons and a harness and all the basic safety gear with which to gain experience with climbing rock faces. Imma not gonna free solo a cliff face the first time I go rock climbing.

Honestly, if something a lot simpler like Notepad++ came with these three tools, I would be very happy.

I miss this workflow sometimes. I started out as a c++ dev with a light weight vim + make workflow. I didn't really want an ide. I didn't have to configure much and I knew the libraries well enough that auto-completions didn't really interest me.

After getting a few full stack web projects made me jump to vscode. There's too many libraries and languages to juggle. Going without a smarter editor starts feeling like leaving time (aka money) on the table.

YES! I've been programming for 55 years, so far, and have never used an IDE except for one year playing with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. I've always answered questions over on /r/learnpython like this:

    Q: I want to learn python, what IDE should I install?
    A: Why learn both python _and_ an IDE? Just learn python on the commandline.

Though I'm happy in my curmudgeonly rut, it's nice to meet a fellow minimalist aesthete.