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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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Writing Java is unbearable without Eclipse/Netbeans. .NET a little bit less unbearable

If your IDE "works harder" than your compiler, something seems wrong to me (of course we all expect things like syntax highlighting today)

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Meh. It's about trade-offs. Some languages are designed to be lightweight and require minimal assistance from the IDE. Some languages are optimised for very large codebases and expect a lot of "ceremony and plumbing" around them. And then there are, of course, millions of shades between the two extremes. Java and C# are in the second group. These are all very useful tools when used for the right purposes.

(Also I have written a fair amount of Java in vim and I didn't find it any more frustrating than writing Ruby in vim. And I don't even like Java.)

Java pretty much created the concept of a modern IDE where the editor knows about the libraries and does boilerplate expansion for you. This wasn't generally needed before the age of Java.

Java also invented extreme overengineering of libraries, making it a need to have syntax completion for even trivial tasks

Probably doing socket programming in C is easier than in Java

(to be fair, it wasn't Java really, it was "OO evangelists" most likely, starting with C++ then going crazy with Java. Too bad they didn't even touch smalltalk

> Probably doing socket programming in C is easier than in Java

Actually... networked programming is really easy in Java.

You are right though the state of a lot of java libs is hilarious! Smalltalk seems really cool but I've never had a reason to devote time to it.

Learning OOP with Smalltalk can actually hurt your career.

I learned OOP with Smalltalk/V, wrote some apps with Actor on Windows and, when first confronted with C++ I closed the book in horror and only came back 8 years later.

Is not smalltalk's "IDE" so, so much more all-knowing than any java one?

It's not unbearable, I've done a huge amount of Java coding on the command-line. Yes, it's harder, but I strongly believe it's better to move onto Eclipse only after learning how the tools actually work underneath. It makes it far easier to debug weird issues with the IDE, and means you're not SOL if the IDE breaks, or you're on another person's computer - you're just a bit slower, and I'd argue that applies to all tools (custom aliases, bash scripts, vim config) and not just IDEs.

This may be a problem if your truck breaks down in the desert, your 3g is out of range and you never thought to install an ide beforehand but apart from that when would you find yourself writing java without an ide?

When you're using somebody else's computer.

When was the last time any professional software developer was forced to do any real development on someone elses computer? In that case it is likely that one will miss his keyboard, desktop shortcuts, shell aliases, browser bookmarks much more than tour ide.

So you have never been asked for help from a junior developer whose development setup is different than yours?

Help in this context means discussion, advice, him showing me what he had done, me suggesting quick solution, or talking to him what to type, similar to pair programming. If _I_ had to actually write more than few lines of code, we'd just switch to my computer.

We have a standard IDE set-up for our team and require more junior devs to use it -- a least when starting out. It makes pairing with them easier.

The junior developer who insists on not using an IDE working with Java is precisely the one who needs the most help.

Edge case. I develop on my own machine (That said, I absolutely hate the verbosity of Java and love Nods.js exactly for this reason).

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