As someone who has been doing this either professionally (since 1996) or as a hobbyist programming in assembly and a little Basic (1986-1992), I’m always amazed at the feigned Slashdot style “I haven’t owned a Tv in 40 years why do people still watch them”.

Are you really saying that you don’t see any utility in modern IDEs? Even back in 1999 I thought Visual Studio was a breath of fresh air let alone R# with all of the built in refactors in 2008.

But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend

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guerrilla 17 hours ago | parent [-]

What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal. Another way of putting it is why would I need an IDE other than UNIX (GNU) itself?

> But going further back, to the Turbo days in college and my first few years working, breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, watches etc were a godsend

gdb does all of that.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I can also walk 13 miles or get in my car and drive. So why do I need a car? GDB does guaranteed safe refactors over large code bases?
	▲	miohtama 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Because working in an IDE is an order of magnitude easier than with UNIX tools, especially for novices, significantly increasing productivity. The author also covers this a bit.
	▲	nec4b 14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>> What I'm saying is that they can't do anything I can't do in a terminal. Why do you need a terminal for if you can do all that with flipping switches and looking at LEDs?