This comment sounds, to me, borne of hatred and scorn more than anything else. Carefully chosen words, like “ludditism” and “dogma” do more to evoke feelings in people, and less to inform us. This comment is a true disservice to the conversation.
There’s a mental cost to every tool you learn how to use. It makes no sense to try and learn every programming tool, you’ll never get any work done. I see no reason why we should scorn people who leave “IDE” or “debugger” off their own personal list of tools that they work with. Calling it “ludditism” is name-calling, same as “dogma”.
I’ve used Visual Studio, even for extended periods of time, with its fantastic debugger. I’ve used older IDEs that weren’t as good. I’ve used various text editors and environments. What I don’t like about using a debugger is how rarely it helps more than the alternatives—so every time I need to use it, I need to learn how to use it again in whatever environment I happen to be programming in. Perhaps if you’re writing code in the same environment, the calculus is different. But no need for name calling.
Same with IDEs. Somehow, by some series of accidents, I use Emacs for about 95% of my coding. There are a couple key bindings in Emacs which I’ve set to match the default keybindings in Visual Studio or Xcode. But because I’m often programming in different environments, using Emacs instead of Visual Studio means that I can get by with learning fewer tools, and spend that effort elsewhere. No need to call it ludditism.
Eh, as a non-IDE user myself, I think you’re being a bit harsh as I don’t think that was the spirit of the author’s comment at all. In fact I found it to ring quite true and if there was any name-calling, I certainly did not feel offended. The fact is there is a certain luddite-esque aesthetic to working in a simple modal editor like Vim (or Emacs in your case) and everyone invents their own dogma to follow, to a certain extent. I happen to find that there is merit in using simple tools, and latent benefits like really getting to know a code-base in a way that predictive fuzzy autocompletion will not allow me to do. There is no global optima when it comes to people’s workflows, just individuals finding what works best for them.
Mental costs, name-calling.. also seem choosen words for your argument.
Just to show you how diverse our work and workflows can be, I've find the opposite of your experience. Using a debugger served me often better and faster than printlining, but using all three techniques help: print, log and interactive debug, as you need..
There’s a mental cost to every tool you learn how to use. It makes no sense to try and learn every programming tool, you’ll never get any work done. I see no reason why we should scorn people who leave “IDE” or “debugger” off their own personal list of tools that they work with. Calling it “ludditism” is name-calling, same as “dogma”.
I’ve used Visual Studio, even for extended periods of time, with its fantastic debugger. I’ve used older IDEs that weren’t as good. I’ve used various text editors and environments. What I don’t like about using a debugger is how rarely it helps more than the alternatives—so every time I need to use it, I need to learn how to use it again in whatever environment I happen to be programming in. Perhaps if you’re writing code in the same environment, the calculus is different. But no need for name calling.
Same with IDEs. Somehow, by some series of accidents, I use Emacs for about 95% of my coding. There are a couple key bindings in Emacs which I’ve set to match the default keybindings in Visual Studio or Xcode. But because I’m often programming in different environments, using Emacs instead of Visual Studio means that I can get by with learning fewer tools, and spend that effort elsewhere. No need to call it ludditism.