New Programmers Should Not Use an IDE
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I have always found Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) a bit of a double-edged sword. They’re great for quickly churning out code, but awful for understanding the code you’ve written and the language it’s written in.
Don’t get me wrong, the code completion (and sometimes, code correction) features an IDE offers are a great tools that come in handy all the time. However, if you are new to the language, or especially new to programming in general, such features will hinder your ability to fully learn and understand what you’re writing.
Starting off with an IDE can also lead to bad habits in the future. For example, you might be use to your IDE automagically correcting anything from whitespace to brackets. While this is nice, what happens when the situation arises where you must write code without an IDE or even without a computer at all (e.g., at a job interview)?
My suggestion for new programmers is to crack open their favorite simple text editor (I prefer Gedit in Linux) and begin coding. I know I and others have greatly benefited from doing so.
5 Comments
Rob
October 7th, 2011
at 9:12pm
I’ve thought this very same thing from time to time!
Mictlan
December 6th, 2011
at 7:46pm
You are right, nowadays many new programmers rely too much on IDE like Delphi for example. Rarely a young programmer would actually write his/her own code in other than the IDE of his/her choice. Little is know for some of them that they don’t actually need an entire IDE just to write a program.
IDE’s generate a lot of code and most new programmers won’t even consider to modify it or even to acknowledge it.
Thanks for your blog, I’m definitely reading it since you have a lot of IT articles here.
Mictlan
December 6th, 2011
at 7:48pm
By the way I found about you in a Chris Pirillo video. He mentioned you and said many good things about you and your work.
Eddie
December 6th, 2011
at 7:52pm
Thanks! I’m still adjusting to becoming a Lockergnome writer. I’ll be focusing on getting posts on Lockergnome once a day for the time being, but I’ll also be posting here whatever might be too technical for Lockergnome’s audience.
Mark
December 20th, 2011
at 8:13am
Hello Eddie nice to meet you. I’m Jakash3. I totally agree. I try to avoid IDEs (except Qt Creator…really nice IDE and framework), I use NEdit editor on Lubuntu 11.10. I don’t like using software that’s smarter than me (by having lots of features that I don’t use or know/care about).