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Comment by shanelja | Hacker News Reader

I perfectly agree with you that using a quality IDE allows you to achieve all of those things and I don't argue that features such as autocomplete (and I believe you touched on macros) can be extremely useful.

But I still pose the question, why is it worth the time to learn what is considered a complicated IDE (if it needs to be taught)? Would the time not be spent better, say, being genuinely productive, rather than merely preparing for future productivity?

We live in the here and now, my boss wants to hear that my project will be done on time, not that it will be a week late because I need to learn the more fickle aspects of an IDE he didn't sanction before I can finish it.

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I disagree that needing to learn something is counter productive. They are simply extra capabilities, and you don't need to use them if you don't want to. I've been using visual studio for a few years now an I still out of the blue find an extra capability that makes me have to hit less buttons, or not having to touch the mouse.

Little things like jumping to a function with pressing a button, or finding all things that are referencing a function\class\etc are extremely useful, but certainly not necessary. Then things like intellisense are a godsend.

That being said, a lot of my time is spent out of visual studio, but with Sublime Text which add's a lot of things that simply make me have to type less, and focus more on the actual task at hand.

I don't honestly have a response to this, thus far my comments have been based upon opinion, do you have a link to Sublime Text? I feel the only way to truly decide will be for me to install it and try it myself for a week and then attempt to decide fairly which I prefer.

What do/did you program?

why is it worth the time to learn what is considered a complicated IDE (if it needs to be taught)? Would the time not be spent better, say, being genuinely productive

Why delegate work when that takes time you could spend doing the work yourself? Because you can't do everything. At some point delegating starts to pay a return on the effort.

The goal is for You + Computer to create a system which is greater than the sum of its parts. For you to use the computer as an external brain.

If it's just you and notepad-as-typewriter, you're doing all the work.

If you're going to be programming long enough, saving yourself a few minutes a day by mastering your tools is a real and genuine benefit. When you intend on continuing a career in programming, you're already committed to investing time into deeply learning novel things as you need them to keep up with work -- a new language, a new library, a new system, a new subfield of study -- so it's not as if your work is nothing but trying to complete your current project, as fast as possible.

You shouldn't spend a week learning about an IDE feature in the middle of your project, but you should eventually spend ten minutes to learn to write a macro instead of making the same change seventy times, and maybe you should spend an hour and a half wiring your editor up to your favorite static analyzers and compiler so that you can test and debug your code quickly over the next month.

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