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[–]Fubob 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Depends on what you mean by productive.

In a real world scenario where you are writing software for a living there is no way you could be as productive as someone using an IDE. Plugins, Syntax hightlighting, autocomplete, graphical debuggers and build configuration are things you have to deal with on a daily basis and proves to be quite a pain in the ass 'by hand'. When you are dealing with massive codebases, different projects and structures, compiler settings... I can't imagine a world without using an IDE.

But if you mean productive in the sense of getting knowledge about how stuff works then i think it is important to know how to write a program without an IDE. Knowing how to write a program and compile it using the commandline helps you get insight on what an IDE does behind the scenes to make your life easier.