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Is this really the death of the IDE...?

12 February 2007

by Huw Collingbourne

We don’t want none of those steenken’ IDEs. Such, it would appear, is the confirmed prejudice of many a modern day programmer. This is a prejudice which, I confess, I do not understand. The determination to use the worst tools for the job seems, to me, positively perverse.

However, the anti-IDE sentiment is remarkably prevalent among the ranks of the advocates of ‘scripting languages’ such as PHP, Python and Ruby. Lurking as I frequently do on forums and newsgroups devoted to those languages, I am often made to feel like an old and lumbering mammoth who’s somehow strayed into field full of ‘agile’ gazelles. Then again, I never have seen the light when it comes to agile methodologies or, indeed, to any other –ologies. These agile youngsters would have me believe that IDEs are bad, big and slow you down...

Suffice to say, I beg to differ.

I grew up with IDEs ranging from the simple (but darn’ good for its day) Turbo Pascal to the much more complex (and remarkably good for our day) Visual Studio. En route I’ve dabbled in Delphi, Visual Café, Komodo, Dolphin Smalltalk and a handful of other fairly decent IDEs.

Ah, Smalltalk! That’s the language to blame. In the bad old days when users of other languages were obliged to code in simple editors (or no editor at all) and go through the arcane rituals of compiling and linking before they even knew whether or not their program would run, Smalltalk programmers just pointed, clicked and evaluated. If you aren’t familiar with Smalltalk, I recommend the Dolphin implementation so – give it a go.

Oh, did I mention that Dolphin Smalltalk ‘only’ runs on Windows? That’s another criticism that is often made among the coders of open source languages. Windows is perceived as a niche market. In one memorable phrase, I recall a Ruby programmer expressing bafflement at my decision to develop a Ruby IDE for Visual Studio. In his opinion, Windows was a niche but Visual Studio was just a ‘niche within a niche’.

I must admit that I find it a little depressing that the visionary ideals of Smalltalk, almost three decades ago, have largely defined modern computing and yet are being actively rejected by a large percentage of the new generation of computer programmers.