IDE or Inert Drowsy Environment

courtesy of http://www.dilbert.com/



There was a time when you had to choose between Emacs and VI. In every development team there was a battle. Who would push the CTRL-X CTRL-something faster? Who would knock that ESC key like there was no tomorrow? But something happened at that time. IDEs, already popular in the Microsoft world, took over...

What we gained in speed, we lost in skills.

Today you can spot who was there at the time, and who is what I call an IDE slave. Java developers were considered better developers for that reason. They had to know the library by heart. They had to scan countless javadocs to achieve what they had to do.

Its sad that you don't meet a lot of genuine developers these days. Weird thing is that pretty much everyone consider themselves senior...

So do yourself a favor: next time you learn a new language, forget that IDE for a few weeks. Yes, you will be slow, but you will learn so darn fast that it will look like a great investment.