Thimbles & Care

MS and Oracle’s big dev tools – who needs ’em?

There’s general agreement on the productivity benefits of the modern IDE: more structured code editing and navigation, import and dependency management, and real time syntax checking. Code quality improves with semantic analysis, which can detect uninitialized and unused variable errors. Code readability improves with richer syntax highlighting that helps differentiate between static, instance, and local variables.

But lighter-weight tools offer a more rapid edit/test cycle with less waiting time. The command line remains one of the most powerful and fastest ways to interact with your system.

Emacs, Vim, and other editors have basic syntax highlighting and code navigation for an even broader set of formats despite the fact that they lag behind IDEs in features. Though IDEs offer impressive plug-in capabilities, traditional script and config files seem easier to learn and use and ultimately more flexible.

Count me firmly in the “text editor plus command line” camp.