I feel like this has more to do with what field you work in and what language/paradigm you use. Especially if you're working within some bullshit walled garden, you may not have a choice. I'm a terminal jockey myself, but I mostly program in C, so my code is procedural and to the point. Maybe I might want some fancy smart refactoring feature if I worked in a language where half the code is boilerplate or glue.

If I have the choice though, I don't see any advantage to an IDE. It's like the combination of many tools rolled into a single, bloated UI with about 60% of their original functionality. And I guess it lets you build "projects" and choose which files will be built. That part never made sense to me. I don't need a program for that! Just delete it dog. It's in the repo!

IDE:

Text editor
Source control
Debugger
Compiler
Terminal
File explorer

I'm my opinion, these programs are just better as separate programs.

(Rant) One thing that grinds my gears... Some IDEs will leave you with the dumbest possible directory structure imaginable. Like actively hostile toward us terminal jockeys. Remember, we are repeatedly typing these things out like cavemen. For example, c/c++ developers who put their headers in a separate, but identical directory structure. Oh and let's do full taxonomy and go 10 directories deep. And what the hell, capitalize random letters and throw in some with spaces into the directory names for good measure. These things don't have to matter to IDE people, but it is something to be mindful of.

[–] rozodru@piefed.social 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

just run everything thru Doom Emacs. Terminal? emacs, git? emacs, ide? emacs, WM? emacs.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

It really is a great OS

[–] MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago (10 children)

You don't even need a text editor, you can write it on paper.

But both are terrible options if you want to actually get stuff done, now that we have better tools.

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[–] lb_o@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

These meme spreads misinformation under the disguise of wisdom.

Those on the right side are too blind in their arrogance and probably seldom face challenging tasks in large codebases.

[–] MattR@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

In my experience way too many people are ignorant in regards of negative effects of AI usage and the data centers, both in regard to global environmental problems and the catastrophic consequences for the local population in the vincinity of large data centers. And there is the partially illegal acquisition/processing of training data, esp. the permanent storage of the original copyrighted works. That kind of ignorance is far worse than being ignorant to the couple of use cases where AI can be helpful. And that's why I dislike AI-fan-boying.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

I'm on the far left.

[–] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 93 points 3 days ago (6 children)

I disagree that a person with low IQ would think its possible to code using a simple text editor. If anything he needs IDE more than any one else.

[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 66 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, it doesn't fit the template but the low IQ version would be more like "You only need ChatGPT for coding."

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[–] PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Every self-taught programmer I've seen starts off hacking at something in Notepad.

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[–] JamBandFan1996@lemmy.ml 75 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (14 children)

You can take away my auto complete, performance monitoring and all that jazz but you can't tell me a debugging system isn't absolutely essential if you actually want to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 44 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Why debugger when print?

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[–] Sir_Premiumhengst@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just use a magnetized needle;... the way it was always inteneded to.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

xkcd.com/378/

[–] Juice@midwest.social 25 points 2 days ago

need ai integration to code

Nah that dude is on the left, and he makes 250k per year

[–] Ascend910@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Emac?

[–] kamen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

... s?

[–] ReallyCoolDude@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Had some juniors who was git diffing in the terminal PRs of 20 more files with 200 changed lines. A newly appointed senior told them that was the best approach. Needless to say there had always to be some follow up push after they opened the PR on web. U dont need ai, but you need a fucking GUI.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

Or TUI.

[–] Hippy@piefed.social 39 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Why do you need a text editor? Just use radiation to bit flip the memory into the configuration you need.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 40 points 2 days ago

https://xkcd.com/378/

[–] molten_boron@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

Just need a magnetized needle and a steady hand.

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 37 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (29 children)

I have never seen or known a serious professional who preferred to work outside of a full featured IDE. All the most skilled and highest paid developers I've ever known were more adamant about using the IDE when compared to the less skilled developers who preferred to do things more via command line and text editors. Just my experience. I often suspect that this meme is shared and liked by people who aren't really professionals. Perhaps I just haven't encountered them yet.

Edit: It seems I indeed haven't encountered them! Although I do stand by my original point to the extent that it seems there are disciplines where IDEs are best and disciplines where they aren't. I enjoyed reading everyone's responses and thinking about areas of software that I don't usually think about. It's given me lots to look into. Thanks everyone who responded nicely! Also, I definitely did not mean to imply that specialists working without IDEs are amateurs or anything like that! Much respect to everyone out there making software.

[–] coriza@lemmy.world 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Just for reference, because programming is not one big tent, as far as I know most people working professionally developing for the Linux kernel, gcc and glic uses only a text editor and "Unix as your IDE". I never tried myself but I have a feeling that any IDE with git integration would just immediately cry trying to interact with the kernel or gcc git repo. Even gits own PS1 status feature slows to crawl in this repos.

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[–] Corbin@programming.dev 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

So, you've never known any Unix hackers? I worked for a student datacenter when I was at university, and we were mostly vim users; as far as text-editor diversity, we did have one guy who was into emacs and another who preferred nano. After that, I went to work at Google, where I continued to use vim. As far as fancy IDE features, I do use syntax highlighting and I know how to use the spell checker but I don't use autocomplete. I've heard of neovim but don't have a good reason to try it out yet; maybe next decade?

[–] mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I admit I haven't known any Unix hackers! I guess my type of work had me assuming they would still prefer an IDE. What is it about this kind of development that makes you prefer text editors, if you don't mind my asking?

[–] Corbin@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

I think that there are two pieces to it. There's tradition, of course, but I don't think that that's a motive. Also, some folks will argue that not taking hands off the keyboard, not going to a mouse, is an advantage; I'm genuinely not sure about that. Finally, I happen to have decent touch typing; this test tells me 87 WPM @ 96% accuracy.

First, I don't spend that much time at the text editor. Most of my time is either at a whiteboard, synchronizing designs and communicating with coworkers, or reading docs. I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of my time is editing text. Moreover, when I'm writing docs or prose, I don't need IDE features at all; at those times, I enable vim's spell check and punch the keys, and I'd like my text editor to not get in the way. In general, I think of programming as Naur's theory-building process, and I value my understanding of the system (or my user's understanding, etc.) over any computer-rendered view of the system.

Second, when I am editing text, I have a planned series of changes that I want to make. Both Emacs and vim descend from lineages of editors (TECO and ed respectively) which are built out of primitive operations on text buffers. Both editors allow macro-instructions, today called macros, which are programmable sequences of primitive operations. In vim, actions like reflowing a paragraph (gqap) or deleting everything up to the next semicolon and switching to insert mode (ct;) are actually sentences of a vim grammar which has its own verbs and nouns.

As a concrete example, I'm currently hacking Linux kernel because I have some old patches that I am forward-porting. From the outside, my workflow looks like staring out the window for several minutes, opening vim and editing less than one line over the course of about twenty seconds, and restarting a kernel build. From the inside, I read the error message from the previous kernel build, jump to the indicated line in vim with g, and edit it to not have an error. Most of my time is spent ~~legitimately slacking~~ multitasking. This is how we bring up hardware for the initial boot and driver development too.

Third! This isn't universal for Linux hackers. I make programming languages. Right now, I'm working with a Smalltalk-like syntax which compiles to execline. There's no IDE for execline and Smalltalks famously invented self-hosted IDEs, so there's no existing IDE which magically can assist me; I'd have to create my own IDE. With vim, I can easily reuse existing execline and Smalltalk syntax highlighting, which is all I really want for code legibility. This lets me put most of my time where it should go: thinking about possibilities and what could be done next.

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[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

On the contrary most people I know who "really know their shit" are using neovim and cli tools.

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[–] AbsolutePain@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I know more than one person (I think 4, including me) who code for a living and essentially live in tmux.

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[–] BartyDeCanter 9 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I’m a “serious professional” who has been developing for over 20 years and I’ve generally prefer a text editor the IDEs that I’ve had to use at work. I find that most IDEs are slow resource hogs that don’t give me features that I actually care about over a fast text editor.

The singular exception was Cider when I was at Google. It was fantastic at wrangling their massive monorepo, and integration with their code review and ticket system was nice. Somehow it was snappy and reliable even though it ran in Chrome.

Nowadays I’ve switched to Helix and use LSPs for the languages I use most. For what it’s worth, those are C, C++, Rust and Python. Mostly Rust and Python now.

[–] Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago

I started using Helix a few weeks ago and I'm in love. I don't want to spend multiple weekends figuring out the ideal plugin configuration of neovim. Helix seems to do everything I want it to do and nothing I don't, right out of the box.

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[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 27 points 2 days ago (6 children)

You also need a compiler or interpreter because wtf man you gotta run some stuff during development

[–] apftwb@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If you write C code in a text file and rename the file extension to .exe and try to run it the CPU will do something.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago

This statement is technically correct, the best kind of correct.

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 43 points 3 days ago (4 children)

I have no desire to work on a large project in a plain text editor.

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[–] lengau@midwest.social 26 points 2 days ago

Joke's on you, with LSPs most text editors are full IDEs.

[–] red_tomato@lemmy.world 34 points 3 days ago (11 children)

No one is going to take IntelliJ from me. Tab completion master race!

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