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Comment by hohohmm | Hacker News Reader

Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand. Why drive a car. Why not walk to grocery so you could reflect carefully on what you want to buy and feel your muscle twitching after carrying 30 pounds of grocery back. Tools are there to help out with the labor and free up your mind for the more important. There is nothing wrong with understanding all the details, but there is no point repeating it all the time once you do.

Edit: That post also mentioned the fear of exploding complexity. The whole point of abstraction is to manage complexity. The fact that you have a function being called at a hundred places and you don't keep track of them all in your mind is not something to fear, if you do the abstraction right. The fact that the previous fact makes you feel unsettling, should make you feel doubly unsettling.

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> Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor or you don't want to program at all.

On the one hand, a smarter editor is a useful tool; on the other hand, if a language makes me feel like I need a smart editor, that means that it isn't clear and concise on its own, and even if the editor helps me find and write things, there's a lot of visual noise in the code itself that's preventing me from seeing things as easily as I want.

The language itself is both a part of the UI, and a part of the infrastructure on which additional programming UI can be built. As infrastructre, its good if it supports good additional tooling; as UI, its bad if it needs additional tooling.

If most of the interaction is through tooling because the base language is not human-usable enough to be the primary interaction mechanism for programmers, then the "source" language needs to be defined in terms of the pieces that programmers should primarily interact with and the other form should be an intermediate representation used internally by the toolchain but not normally exposed to the programmer.

> Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand.

Whenever I try Java, I don't want a smarter editor. I want a smarter language.

That's true of most people, but in some situations Java's unavoidable.

I use emacs or sublime for java coding 90% of the time. Of course it is vital to have large screen real estate/extra monitors so I can keep the various docs open for reference. I prefer this approach because I learn more about the particular apis I'm using rather than just autocomplete and go.

That said, I have occasionally needed an IDE for java projects but in hindsight that seems to be because those projects were so needlessly large and convoluted that it didn't make sense to try to understand to the entire project in my head. That sounds bad, but that's how I see it. Some projects aren't worth understanding fully, and a good IDE is required for them.

Long story short, I can see the need for a java ide sometimes, but I won't call it a necessity.

True. The need for a full IDE is probably not always necessary. The need for no more than a notepad.exe? Hell no.

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