Comments on: Tip #3 for Young Developers: Master an Editor

By: Ivan Savelyev

Ivan Savelyev — Wed, 11 May 2016 06:03:43 +0000

In reply to Antonio Cangiano. Thank you for your reasonable reply. Regarding Vim, indeed I think it would be nice to understand it better, currently I only use it at my job to edit configs/scripts on the servers. Last time I remember writing something that somewhat could be considered as program maybe 10-12 years ago in Turbo Pascal for the classes I was taking as a kid, so I guess there is a reason why I'm an IDE guy :)

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Tue, 10 May 2016 18:41:50 +0000

In reply to Ivan Savelyev.

When it comes to editors and IDEs, I have a simple rule: use what makes you happy and productive. An editor or IDE should not get in the way. In fact, it should help somewhat with accidental complexity, so to speak.

You tried Atom and found WebStorm to work better for you. Awesome. Use WebStorm. There is no medal for self-sacrifice in software engineering. Anything that leads you to write better code is a good thing.

I would still recommend learning the basics of Vim for its advantages when working on a remote machine, but it’s perfectly fine to use an IDE as your main development environment and editor.

By: Ivan Savelyev

Ivan Savelyev — Tue, 10 May 2016 16:20:11 +0000

This topic is still something that I’m not confident with. I’m not a professional developer, just an enthusiast (well who would like to become professional 🙂 ), and maybe it’s the last thing that I should worry about while learning, but still it bothers me. Some say that IDEs are heavy, or you would acquire bad habits while using it as many things are automated etc, etc, etc. On the other hand, I’ve used Atom for some time and then switched to JetBrains WebStorm and it just feels so right to me like extension of myself, and you have everything just next to your hand including terminal.

Ok, I understand that you can rely too much on the IDE and then critically lose your productivity if you don’t have one available. But I don’t get the point about being heavy? Ok maybe IntelliJ itself is heavy, but WebStorm, RubyMine, PyCharm? It’s 2016 now ultrabooks have at least 8GB RAM, SSDs, i5 processors does it like really matters if WebStorm is a bit heavier of Atom for e.g.?

Antonio, could you please share your thoughts against using the IDE for newbies? Is this something that can negatively affect the Young Developer?

Thank you!