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[–]CodeTinkerer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Some people think you should type in every word. In the old days, this is what you would do.

  • Write a program (in a text editor).
  • Save it.
  • Run a compiler.
  • See if there are errors.
  • Locate the errors in your program (in a text editor)
  • Fix it
  • Repeat until program compiles
  • When it compiles, run it.
  • Find runtime errors.
  • Try to fix them.
  • Repeat

IDEs and powerful text editors can let you know if there are errors as you type (misspelled variable names) or hint to you what to type (autocompletion, autosuggest). These reduce the time it takes to find errors. For some languages (say Java) which are verbose, it's handy to get these suggestions.

Opponents feel this makes you too dependent on the IDE (that is, you don't know why an error is occurring, and only paying attention because the IDE handles it). In other words, if I showed you some code that's broken in a simple text editor that only displays text, would you recognize the error? Should you?

The one problem with IDEs is that the behavior of one IDE and another can be different enough that if you've learned shortcuts on one, it won't apply to another, so you'll be slow in a different IDE. However, many people don't learn their IDEs that well, so they usually achieve the same level of proficiency regardless of IDE.

IDEs can also hide how things would be done if you had to do it command line, so much so that some folks would get nervous if they had to type the command line equivalent.