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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Actually, SharpDevelop is not the same project as MonoDevelop: http://monodevelop.com/

MonoDevelop was forked from SharpDevelop but they diverged. Unity has MonoDevelop with Unity-specific patches and they are a little behind. Xamarin Studio is also MonoDevelop with proprietary stuff.

Speaking of the "linux version", linux distributions are very far behind in the package versions provided and the folks at Xamarin are only doing packages for OpenSuse. If you want to do development with Mono, Linux is unfortunately not a good OS to be on. Mind you, this is nobody's fault - it's just lack of interest.

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FlashDevelop was also a fork of SharpDevelop. It was a very good base and the first mono IDE that was pretty solid to use and build upon. FD is/was arguably the best as3 coding environment in pre-Unity days.

Weird, so the best place to develop with Mono is actually on Windows????? What's the point of making it cross platform then?

No, it's OS X.

Don't need no stinkin IDE, just a text editor and a compiler. You'll learn more than when using an IDE.

If you're a student / novice working on small projects, aiming to learn and improve yourself maybe. If you work in a production environment "learning" isn't a strong enough reason.

I would second this because with many many files and namespaces and stacks of dependencies and libraries, an IDE isn't a luxury - it is a necessity.

I worked for years without an "IDE", within Emacs, spanning multiple languages, including Java and Scala. I was defining snippets for boilerplate, I was using ctags for navigation and the agility with which you can jump around and edit text makes up for the lack of intellisense, etc...

Got used to IntelliJ IDEA for about a year ago. It's nice, but my actual work productivity hasn't increased. Seriously, I now use an IDE because I feel more comfortable within IDEA, as when you're using a text editor, you don't just use a text editor, but rather the entire Unix toolchain and I got tired of stressing out my memory. And btw, I still open Emacs a lot because I'm missing Emacs' macros and undo capabilities amongst others.

If you want an IDE, sure, use an IDE. Learning a new language with an unfamiliar IDE on the other hand is a really bad idea, since instead of learning the actual language, you end up dealing with the toolset.

You always need to learn the tools you're using. If you rely on autocomplete to learn those tools, you're going to write the kind of shitty software I loathe.

Autocomplete is not for learning "tools". It's for saving typing speed.

Features like "find references", "go to implementation", "find implementations", "show parameter list" are useful for understanding and navigating large code bases. They have nothing to do with how you write "shitty software" they have to do with how you navigate and understand the code base structure.

Writing shitty software has nothing to do with autocomplete.

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