[pm-h] Programmer Editors (was 'January Meeting')

[Todd Rinaldo]

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Robert Boone <robo4288 at gmail.com> wrote:
> As you can tell I don't really care for IDE's, for me they mostly get
> in the way. I would rather build a working environment in an editor
> that let me do that in the way I think is best for me.

I've gotta admit I'm surprised how many people feel a lack of interest
in access to IDEs. I find IDEs help me program/debug faster, as they
point out errors to me as I commit them, rather than 10+ minutes later
when I go to run the code. Usually there's little difference between
fixing the error before or after, but every once in a while, the
mistake is subtle enough that you end up spending much more time down
the road trying to figure out what tidbit of the code went wrong.

 I wonder... If Emacs/vim came with an IDE,  would you use and
appreciate it more? Both of your choices have their origins as
terminal editors. As a result, they do not readily lend themselves to
being an IDE. So I guess my question is whether this an accessibility
issue or truly it holds no value for you?

Another thing occurs to me, which is we might not have a consistent
definition of "IDE" here. Most of these apps offer some features of an
IDE. The major one for me is code analysis, but it occurs to me that
syntax hilighting, etc. would also be components of an IDE, which
would make everything but Notepad an IDE :D

Todd