OK, I wrote an anti-IDE rant some days ago, dissing NetBeans and its ilk and extolling the virtues of Vim as my primary code editor. Read that here, if you are curious. I took some liberties with the English language, for which I sincerely apologize to the queen of England. Somebody posted it on Reddit and it got tweeted and linked on Code Project. I found a bunch of comments needing moderation. Some were thoughtful, some vitriolic. However, one comment was absolutely hilarious:

Writing code in vim makes me hate life. I've written a large perl/bash/php system in it and wanted to kill myself nightly. Your article, while very accurate for some people, makes other developers throw up in their mouth. IDE's features like code-folding and boilerplate generation are there to help developers develop more rapidly, which is something that is very valuable in todays market. Sure, Java sucks, but when you don't have a choice, what are you gonna do? Write C# in notepad? I dont think so. If I had to write all my code in vim, and meet deadlines, I would blow my brains out. I love my Visual Studio. And for the record, no crashes, no instability, no hate. You may call me names, and say I'm not a real developer, but for RAD theres nothing like a well balanced IDE. That being said, Netbeans sucks donkey dong. Im a VS user.

Firstly, I took no offense at this comment. In fact, I loved it. Now, I think the commenter missed a couple points. I'm not suggesting people write C# in notepad. To be fair, I've spent years using Visual Studio as my professional, get-things-done IDE. It is pretty stable, and useful if you are developing Windows apps. I'm not developing Windows apps. Thank God. That would make me want to blow my brains out.

Admittedly, Vim just ain't for every developer. I've flirted with using it for all my work, but usually went crawling back to the big IDE's because of something I couldn't do without. Usually, I just didn't know how to do it right in Vim. But this time, the conversion is permanent. Yeah, it kind of sucks at first, but I just stuck with it until my proficiency surpassed what I could do in any pointy-clicky IDE. It didn't take as long as you might think.

All I am arguing for is choice and exploration. There are reasons that I don't develop in Java or C#, I don't want to. I work in a non-corporate setting and I don't write enterprisey code. I like it that way. It's not for everyone. Some folks like the grey cubicles, memos, meetings, harassment prevention classes, ID cards, office politics, etc. I've been there, done that. Life is too short. Pick the tools you want. However, know that a good number of software developers in the world use Vim or Emacs, not because they don't know about big, fancy IDE's, but because they can do more, faster with those tools. You can be a fantastic developer writing C# in Visual Studio or Java in Eclipse. You can also be a fantastic developer writing R on napkins or Fortran on punch cards for all I care.

Just know this, I close tickets. I write unit tests. I ship good, clean, unit-tested code. Yeah, I know, unit tests aren't perfect. If you have to pick a religion, you could do worse. I don't pair-program. God help me, I'll never understand how two people and one keyboard are more productive than two people and two keyboards, unless you can't motivate either of them to work otherwise. But, hey, if that's what you need to get through the day, find a consenting partner and pair-program to your heart's content.