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Your IDE: tool or crutch? Take the quiz…
An integrated development environment (IDE), like NetBeans or IntelliJ for Java, is a tool that enhances a computer programmer’s productivity.
A tool as in something that enables us to do quickly and easily something that would take us too long to do without assistance.
After a white-boarding interview exercise, one of my mentors said that an IDE can be a crutch.
A crutch as in something that we rely on so much that it atrophies our ability to do something we should be able to do without machine help.
In this article I will mostly only use examples from Java IDEs, specifically NetBeans and IntelliJ. But a lot of the concepts carry over to IDEs for other programming languages, like XCode for Objective-C and Swift, or VS Code for JavaScript and just about everything else.
And of course both NetBeans and IntelliJ can be used for programming languages other than Java. I’ve used NetBeans for C++ and have thought about using it for FORTRAN (curiousity, mostly). And IntelliJ is now what I mostly use for Scala.
Some people think that if you’re not using an editor like Vim you’re not a real programmer, you’re a pretender, an impostor.
A very good example of how much an IDE helps with refactoring comes from my reading of Building…