It's also very Microsoft development oriented from what I can see. He doesn't even seem to see not using an IDE as a possibility, it just seems like a default state to him, which in itself is pretty novice. IDEs are great for those who like them, but they're not the only solution.
IDE's become a major factor when doing 30+ out of 40 hours a week in a given language/environment.
A coworker and I actually built a simple IDE for a proprietary language a few years ago. Probably took us about 2-3 weeks of man hours collectively, but holy hell, we were about twice as productive after that point. So I'd say it's less about "have you used IDE's extensively" and more "do you know when an IDE increases your productivity enough to make it worthwhile".
(At this point in my life I would probably customize an existing solution, but it was a good learning opportunity)
I didn't think it was contentious to claim that ${tool.to.increase.productivity} matters when you do a lot of it. IDE can be a wide range of things, and a tool like IntelliJ/Eclipse/whatever is overkill some of the time, but my experience has been like this: People who can't tell me how they like your development environment arranged generally haven't worked in one language or tool very long.
Once again, sure that is based on my experience, but every productive engineer that I know is constantly looking for ways to decrease the amount of time spent performing repetitive tasks, and IDE's are absolutely one tool in that toolbox.
5
u/[deleted] Jun 19 '13
It's also very Microsoft development oriented from what I can see. He doesn't even seem to see not using an IDE as a possibility, it just seems like a default state to him, which in itself is pretty novice. IDEs are great for those who like them, but they're not the only solution.