Just to give you a heads up, over the next couple of months, I’m going to make some posts about IDE’s or Integrated Development Environments. I find the topic interesting because I’ve finally used a decent one and I “get it”. I think there are some interesting discussions around them.
First, if it wasn’t for Microsoft’s Visual Studio, I probably wouldn’t use them.
Second, when used properly, they can give a programmer a very significant performance boost.
Third, specific to me, there is a funny oscillation. I went from no IDE, to IDE, and back so many times it’s not funny. The most interested IDE I used was Project builder in NextStep. It was the only IDE that came with the OS and was pretty much required in order to build apps. After that, I was a Vi/Emacs guy for a while. Then I had a discussion with my friend Jack. He was an IDE guy and I wasn’t at the time. At the end of my contract where I was working in the same building, he was a Vi guy and I was the IDE guy (Visual J++).