Tom C. wrote:
James, I’m a big fan of yours, but I’m also keenly aware of poorly
constructed arguments (e.g., ad hominem it bastard brothers). I think I
have to agree with Marc here. I think he was making a legitimate
proposition - in form if not in substance. He may be right, but I cannot
confirm it. And I don’t see any hint of ad hominem here. We DO see
things through the lense of our experience. We have little choice.
I read too quickly and missed that the OP expressed inexperience. So I
was wrong in assessing the intent of the response, and wrong in my
reply. Mea culpa.
However, absent that bit of info, it is generally insulting to suggest
to someone that their particular opinion is due to a lack a experience
(as opposed to criticism the opinion directly). The “you would think
different if you weren’t so inexperienced” line is a common way to knock
down a person rather than the opinion expressed. If nothing else, it’s
cheap and dismissive.
Oddly enough, though, I usually see this particular argument going the
other way; people asserting that IDE’s are a beginner’s crutch, and that
with enough experience people will eventually come around to the One
True Way of Coding.
I don’t find that any more persuasive, and generally don’t see a
connection between experience and IDE preference. It just happens to be
the case with me that more experience has lead me further away from
IDE’s, but I know smart, skilled people who are just the opposite.
I will say, however, that after working with a number of IDE’s, and
rather enjoying them for their “gee whiz” appeal - all those tools, and
such - retreating from the disaster that Aptana was for a while to mere
jEdit and the CLI was a breath of fresh air for me. I felt, and still
feel, MUCH more directly engaged, and I’ve gotten a ton of work done
with these tools.
That sounds like my experience as well, preferring multiple consoles,
screen, gvim, tabs, etc. to some monolithic IDE. But certain projects
and languages beg for an IDE (many large Java projects would have been
hell without NetBeans or Eclipse).
I strongly believe in keeping things as simple as possible. And I should
also mention that while I’ve designed and run a number of websites, I do
not use Rails and am not likely to. I can see how with Rails something
like Aptana or Netbeans might be peachy. Netbeans might be terrific also
if one was using jruby, which certainly does have some nice
features…but not for me.
NetBeans has some sweet refactoring tools, and can’t be beat for the GUI
editor, but when I use it I use it in conjunction with gvim so as to not
slow down my basic editing.
Gotta fit the tools to the guy, and his needs, I suspect.
No doubt.
–
James B.
www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys
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