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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to get punished for saying this, but I don't really see the point of IDEs when you have things like vim, Makefiles and bash. It just seems like more things to go wrong. I used Eclipse while I was doing Java development for a while and it had some conveniences but for the most part I just see it as one more thing that can go wrong and get in my way.

Anyway, does anyone remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior? I see it still exists, but I mean back from the 90s. I got a T-shirt from them at MacWorld '99 and still had it until not too long ago. High quality merch.

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As someone who has been doing this either professionally (since 1996) or as a hobbyist programming in assembly and a little Basic (1986-1992), I’m always amazed at the feigned Slashdot style “I haven’t owned a Tv in 40 years why do people still watch them”.

Are you really saying that you don’t see any utility in modern IDEs? Even back in 1999 I thought Visual Studio was a breath of fresh air let alone R# with all of the built in refactors in 2008.

But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend

What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal. Another way of putting it is why would I need an IDE other than UNIX (GNU) itself?

> But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend

gdb does all of that.

Because working in an IDE is an order of magnitude easier than with UNIX tools, especially for novices, significantly increasing productivity. The author also covers this a bit.

I can also walk 13 miles or get in my car and drive. So why do I need a car?

GDB does guaranteed safe refactors over large code bases?

>> What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal.

Why do you need a terminal for if you can do all that with flipping switches and looking at LEDs?

I won't speak for OP, but generally I don't think the attitude is feigned.

I've tried IDEs and didn't like them. I don't even really like having close parentheses auto-typed for me. It breaks my flow.

The convenience is the point. Instead of having to go and find the file that lists a class's functions, an IDE can list them and you can just click on the one you want. As the author points out, LSPs do that function in the modern era, but the point is, it's useful. Doesn't have to be your cup of tea, but you should at least be able to see the point.

> Anyway, does anyone remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior?

didn't it have a cute little re-distributable header file that had a bunch of useful containers in it? (linked lists, hash tables, etc)

i didn't work with it much but once worked with a mac guy who added it to our project. sometimes i'd have to build his stuff, i remember lots of yellow road construction icons!

I do like the "quietness" of vim. With a minimal configuration I've replaced most of the conveniences I enjoyed with PyCharm and VSCode, but without the constant notification spam and weird virtualenv configuration issues I previously had switching between projects.

I recall CodeWarrior being the official ide for SymbianOS when I started there. And it sucked, but likely more due to the integration. I think sucky custom rarely working IDEs is what pushed me to full time emacs

I can't really imagine navigating huge Java codebases with vim or bash. OTOH I used vim to work with Perl (that was not a small codebase either but had a very different structure).

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