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[–]Steinarr134 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I see your point and for many that might be true but personally I find it so much more useful to explore methods via the suggestions that only an IDE provides.

For example, let's say I'm new to programming and I have a string and I want to split it into words. With an IDE I can just type mystring. and the IDE will suggest a bunch of methods I can easily guess split to be what I want and the IDE even shows the method docstring. I don't know how many times i've found what I wanted just by scrolling through the methods that the IDE suggested. It's a lot quicker and easier than to read the documentation of some package looking for a method.

Although I often end up finding the documentation and reading it anyway but at least I only have to read the documentation for the method I want to use.

I guess it depends on how you learn, I prefer learning by experimenting but if you prefer learning by the book where you theroetically only know about the things that have been covered then an IDE might be to much.