IDEs and the Coders Who (Don’t) Love Them
Unless you live under a rock, you know that integrated development environments are for sissies, and Notepad is the “old school,” “hardcore,” or “l33t” platform for developing code. I call bullshit. A good IDE can reduce time to market, improve coding efficiency, and help you write tighter code.
Per Wikipedia, an integrated development environment is a “software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of: a source code editor, a compiler and/or interpreter, build automation tools, and a debugger.” Stack these features up against Notepad, and you’ll find that it only (barely) provides the source code editor. Wikipedia continues to say that “most modern IDEs also have a class browser, an object inspector, and a class hierarchy diagram, for use with object-oriented software development.”
Given the features Wikipedia has so generously laid out for our perusal, which editor would you rather use? One that offers a single feature (the ability to input text), or one that simplifies workflow, helps you spot errors more quickly, and contains helpful expediters like class browsers? I’m not looking down on people who are “old school” and using Notepad, I’m just pointing out that perhaps it’s become too fashionable to toss wear the “I’m so hardcore I code in Notepad” button.
I once wore that button proudly. Roughly a year ago, a colleague recommended NuSphere’s IDE product, PhpEd. I was very skeptical, and only because of my respect for this colleague did I even try the product. At first, I certainly wasn’t hooked. I had a lot more buttons, toolbars, and other confusing and strange interface elements on my screen than I was used to in Notepad, vi, or even Emacs. However, as I kept using the IDE longer and longer, I found my development lead-times getting shorter and shorter. I was becoming more efficient, spending less time (for example) hunting for method names inside of classes and more time actually writing code. I was hooked.
If you’re a button-wearing Notepad stalwart, you owe it to yourself as a professional to at least give an integrated development environment a shot.
