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Comment by 0xdeadbeefbabe | Hacker News Reader

> IDE's

Lack of an IDE is a feature not a bug.

Edit: or it is a symptom of a feature. No one has written one yet because they are happy with what they have.

> tooling

Do you mean you need an IDE that speaks the language to write anything efficiently? Do you mean your first day on the job is spent setting up tools?

Wrong philosophy in my opinion; I could imagine something better.

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Depends the definition of IDE. My IDE is VIM. Why is it an IDE? Because it understand the text I am editing. An editor does not understand it. Anything, that supports programming on the top of an editor an IDE feature in my view. If you definition of IDE is IntelliJ than it is a different problem. I cannot edit Java without it anymore, Java is just too verbose and too many things can go wrong, I need immediate feedback from my IDE to tell me that I am doing it wrong also collapsing too verbose parts is a great thing. I don't use too much of IDE features but anything that I incorporated to my workflow over the years (very little, I keep it simple) is damn useful and I am pretty sure I would be slower without it.

Languages with small clean syntax do not require that much IDE usage, at least this is my experience. I never thought my Erlang workflow could be improved with something like IntelliJ. I guess having a REPL helps a lot.

Having tools that can spot errors early, help you track them down quickly and help you comprehend, organize and refactor your code can be very useful with a large codebase, and I don't think it's fair to characterize that as "you need an IDE that speaks the language in order to write anything efficiently."

Like gosublime?

Yes, Gosublime is a good example of how tooling can be helpful, though from what I can tell it is somewhat less helpful than what you'd expect in a decent IDE (e.g. no refactoring support, the interface is mainly dropdowns, weak support for finding definitions and usages).

Really, all I need is gofmt on save, and even that is mostly because I've gotten so used to it that I drop ugly unformatted dreck into my editor and let gofmt clean it up.

I worked full time for year without go to definition, mostly because full text search is almost as good most of the time, due to how regular formatted go code is. I don't really use anything else, mostly because I don't need anything else and I have better things to do than install editor plugins.

I really don't get the amount of love for gofmt. It's a formatter. wow! amazing! That's never been done before.

Yes, but it had the One True Format, which is the only way it can possibly work. I've used a formatter at other jobs in other languages, and you end up having your formatter fighting with everyone else's, unless they're configured exactly the same, which no one can ever agree on.

It takes me about 5 minutes to setup IntelliJ. And that includes the download.

And I would never want anyone in my team who was doing major refactoring work without an IDE.

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