Erlang doesn't look like it Just Works on Windows and Visual Studio. No Intellisense? Productivity--. No MSVC build? Productivity--. It better be that much better to sacrifice that much engineering productivity relative to it's competitors.
In contrast...Node.js? Works. C/C++? Works. MongoDB? Works. etc. At least they could pretend to make an effort.
EDIT: It's 2014, serious tools need to integrate into IDEs and support inline development, debugging, and testing. It's ridiculous to be coding in simple text editors that lack the ability to deploy and debug code on the fly. Save that slog for live environments.
So here's the thing. I keep hearing this over an over. And I recently started a job where Visual Studio is is the IDE of choice working on C# code.
So of course I thought. I'll give VS a try. I don't know a whole lot of C# yet so it'll be nice to have a tool helping me get to know the language and stdlib. It only took me half a day to discover that VS which is arguably one of the best IDE's out there beating out Eclipse and IntilliJ for useability and responsiveness still suffers from the same problem all IDE's suffer from.
Poor isolation. I like to build my code and run tests frequently. VS locks the whole UI when I do that. Building and running tests should be a background task.
Say what you want about those of us who prefer our "simple" text editors with our simple tools. But those editors and tools are composable in ways that get out of the way and still gives us that lauded ability to deploy and debug code on the fly you mention.
After my experience I immediately abandoned VS and set up OmniSharp with emacs. Now I get code completion, error reporting, and even style issues highlighted in my editor without interrupting my state of flow.
I’m with you on this one. I’m having to use VS for a current build and it forces you down a one-way-or-the-highway approach. Sure, you can find extensions that alter how it works a bit, but I don’t have the time to learn how to write a VS extension. I’d much prefer the flexibility of a bunch of small tools, each of which works well in isolation. I find VS extremely heavy in resource utilisation.
I expect I’d be much happier if I could swap out the code editor for Sublime as a minimum, but as I’m writing a bunch of LESS code I keep on having to jump back into VS anyway to trigger a recompile.
Amen. IDEs tend to be far too heavy for me, and simple text editors are my preference because of that.
That said, Geany is worth mentioning. Not very fancy or feature-rich, but it gets the job done without feeling like I'm teaching a sumo wrestler to ride a skateboard.
I'm so glad I'm not dependent on a giant piece of software to edit code in. Using a good text editor (I mostly go with Sublime Text, but also use Atom and Emacs) gives me all of the functionality that I need, while letting me work in just about any OS I want, not requiring a boatload of system resources or a slow startup time, not being really strong on one or two languages and average to poor at the rest, and being generally much more customizable. As for intellisense, there are plugins for that in many languages in these text editors, and even without, I've found that the speed at which I code is rarely more than negligibly affected by looking for name of the function I need and such.
Of course, my limited experience with development on windows has shown it to be an absolutely odious experience with regards to command-line tools (it seriously feels like the Windows community ceased working on console tools about 20 years ago), so it doesn't surprise me that developers would prefer to work in Visual Studio. Also, I'm sure it has certain advantages if one is working on a very large code-base.
In contrast...Node.js? Works. C/C++? Works. MongoDB? Works. etc. At least they could pretend to make an effort.
EDIT: It's 2014, serious tools need to integrate into IDEs and support inline development, debugging, and testing. It's ridiculous to be coding in simple text editors that lack the ability to deploy and debug code on the fly. Save that slog for live environments.