On: Development Environments

[sirsinsalot]

Many people seem to think using a commercial proprietary IDE means you somehow forget how to use the CLI or other editors to get the job done. Like they're junk food that makes you dumb.

This is as ridiculous as saying an electrician will forget how to correctly wire because their wire cutters are too good.

I used to be a build-my-own IDE person via VIM. After using PyCharm and realising an IDE is more than an editor, I realise the productivity gains every day.

If I need VIM or something else, it's just another tool in the box and the partisan fist shaking has no place in a mature profession and trade.

[nomel → sirsinsalot]

And, in case anyone wasn't aware, PyCharm has vim plugin, for the editor: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/pycharm/using-product-as-the-...

[anotherhue → sirsinsalot]

It's not that one has forgotten, it's that one never learned.

I watch senior engineers struggle with basic CLI usage daily. In the modern sense of Senior of course.

[sirsinsalot → anotherhue]

Well the modern sense of senior leaves it likely that they have not yet learned to dress themselves either.

That aside, what one doesn't learn doesn't mean the mistake is what one does. Just that they didn't.

[annowiki → sirsinsalot]

I consider myself quite adept at cli, I can sed, grep, find, vim, and git quite well.

However, what I never found convenient in cli was debugging. I was a print debugger for years until my job convinced me to try PyCharm.

I've always thought the reason I never found a suitable debugger in cli was just because I was either too dumb to figure out integrating something like vimspector, or too lazy to get used to gdb/pdb. Ctrl-f on this article has no mention of the word "debug." I think I'm not the only one that never used a debugger before I tried an IDE. I wonder how many people still feel superior in their CLI-Vim/Emacs-only workflow and are just print debugging.

[jrop → annowiki]

I use NeoVim for everything except debugging. For that I (frequently) open up VSCode or Chrome to debug (NodeJS). I haven't figured out a good debug workflow for Rust, though, because I hate print debugging.

[yesbabyyes → jrop]

I'm similar to you (but with vim instead of neovim - I have to say VSCode with the vim extension is winning me over though).

VSCode with rust-analyzer (edit: and CodeLLDB) provides a very nice environment for Rust development in my experience, including debugging.

[pessimizer → sirsinsalot]

> This is as ridiculous as saying an electrician will forget how to correctly wire because their wire cutters are too good.

Or as ridiculous as people forgetting huge parts of their first language because they haven't spoken it in years. Which absolutely happens.