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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

One of the huge advantages of Java's static typing + somewhat boring/verbose syntax is that it makes writing powerful tools for manipulating Java code far, far easier than any of the C-based languages with preprocessors or any dynamic languages.

After working in IntelliJ for a while with its phenomenal refactoring tools going back to any other coding environment feels somewhat stone age in comparison.

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I have been using IDEs since the mid-90's, that is my feeling every time I see anyone coding as if UNIX System V was the latest version available.

I don't use IDEs, but it seems that there are only 2 or 3 that really work: Visual Studio for C/C++, and Eclipse/Intellij for Java. Do you use one of those?

I have used all of these during my professional life so far,

Almost all Basic, C, C++ and Pascal IDEs from Borland for MS-DOS and Windows

The initial releases of Delphi IDE

Visual Studio, only after 32 bit support, not earlier

The first releases of C++ Builder

KDevelop

Anjunta

Eclipse

Netbeans

Smalltalk environments

Lisp environments

Native Oberon environment

And a few more not worth remembering.

Between writing less code with a text editor and writing loads of verbose code with a powerfull IDE i'd chose the former. How much text processing would you write in Java vs Python/Ruby ? This is a no brainer for me. Dynamic languages have their advantages,though i find Scala to be a good compromise.

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