I've lost track of the number of Report Builder files I've had to update via Notepad++ - the intended editor has so many weird kinks and corner cases it's often easier to just edit the file directly!

I use Emacs honestly just because it’s more FUN for me. It’s such an open book internally that when things break, I find I can usually figure it out. There aren’t that many environments that really feel that way. I get that it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but man am I glad to have it.

I had similar opinion, but I’ve changed my mind. Now I can barely do any serious work without an IDE.

The main feature I’m after is code completion. Just getting a peek of which methods are available is something I can’t be without.

Code hints like ”this expression will always evaluate to false” is great to capture difficult to spot mistakes.

Code usage it’s is a must when doing refactors. It makes it easy to analyze how a method is used before I commit to a refactor.

Debugger and profiler is also nice to have.

Something something, use Linux.

I know you joke but topheavy IDEs are discouraging new coders at an alarming rate

You can thank search engines on mobile for that, pure idiocy

I'd say that's true for most devs.

personally though, all that is noise to me and is difficult to maintain focus when it's got all these popups and autofills.

I'm currently maintaining a codebase that's got something like 900 methods/functions across multiple classes, modules, and other objects. It follows a pattern and is pretty easy to maintain though.

another project I'm inheriting is doesn't have any logical flow or pattern and is a shitstorm of JS Christmas trees. I'll likely need to used something that will trace through the callbacks just to see what the fuck is going on.

my point though, is if you depend on the tools that make it easy to write sloppy code, you will write sloppy code because the key feature of the tool allows you to do it without repercussions.

building something without effort rarely ends with a result you can be proud of. this is true for development and in life, IMO.

i can see rust being a bit more challenging to support properly in an IDE and there still being various special cases not handled properly, and i'm glad that it's free to use non-commercially, but with jetbrains rustrover i frequently see it calling out errors in code that happily compiles, autocomplete being semi-random in how it wants to complete today, which seems to have gotten worse with their recent AI pushes, and even a couple times the entire IDE locking up not too long ago, though i don't remember whether the last part was in rustrover or one of their other IDEs. overall pycharm has been pretty stable for me, as long as you provide it with a pre-existing venv or let it create one for you, as the integration with the latest and greatest(tm) python package manager may not be there yet.

More than the complete collapse of the programming profession is discouraging new coders?

More than one thing can destroy an industry at the same time, you know