I find it so fascinating how many programmers proudly declare how they don't use any IDE when incredibly sophisticated tools like solidworks or Synopsis are universally used in engineering

Completely agree, having worked with engineers and scientists for a large part of my career.

Programming is still in this goofy phase as a profession/industry where lots of practitioners interpret suffering and complexity and difficulty as signals of underlying quality.

There are still large numbers of programmers who see advances in human-computer interaction and tools as basically childish, because what matters to them is the feeling of machismo they get while programming, rather than whether their efforts make their users more successful.

See the pushback against IDEs (as you said), syntax highlighting (“syntax highlighting is for children”), Rust (“_I_ know how to manage memory, everyone else is an idiot who needs to git gud”), types generally (“_I_ don’t make type errors”). Even high level languages and garbage collection were met with similar derision when they were going mainstream. There are so many examples of this throughout the history of programming.

If something is hard to do, or resulted in something impressively complex rather than something underwhelmingly simple, it must be good.

Basically, we’re still a very immature profession and it’ll take time before we shed the “the most important thing about programming is that I get to be a wizard” stuff. The users care that the bridge doesn’t fall down when they drive over it. The users don’t care whether designing the bridge made me feel powerful and wizardly because I used a crayon rather than Solidworks.

I don’t like LSPs. They’re slow and bloated. I’ve been using clangd but I think I’ll stop. It’s slow as molasses. It constantly tries to insert headers into source files that cause compilation issues. There are easier and faster ways to jump to definitions.

I don’t use LSPs with Haskell anymore. I work on multiple projects which use different versions of GHC and the base library which means having multiple LSPs installed for each one. Trying to get eMacs to reliably detect which project is using which version is not something I have been able to figure out. Plus it’s slow and uses way too much memory.

At current job I’m doing C# and man does the ecosystem there really push you to use an IDE. Most of my org uses Rider. I find it just as fascinating that people actually like using tools like it. Too bad it doesn’t have a decent text editor built in.

You're phrasing this as if using an IDE was always an advantage, but unfortunately this isn't always the case:

-IDEs are more resources hungry, I remember when trying to use CLion on a big C++ codebase, until increasing the garbage collector maximum heap size all I had was a blank screen, after it was just unusably slow...

-even when IDE work, LSP for C++ codebase aren't very good, for example the caller hierarchy is usually very incomplete..

-I remember having been asked quite a few times, about "how do I use the IDE's integrated debugger to debug a target which was available only through ssh and then you had to telnet from one board to another?" My answer? Use gdb.

That said, I use VSCode now because its multiple tab handling is very nice, but I use it mostly as a glorified text editor (not by choice but because C++ is really IDE's unfriendly).

The language dominates the tooling. Real C programmers probably can't imagine doing real programming without gdb and valgrind. Real Java programmers probably can't imagine doing real programming with gdb and valgrind.

They are using Emacs that's basically an IDE.

every tool present in an IDE is available elsewhere. it’s not that the IDE-avoidant aren’t using sophisticated tools, they just aren’t using them packaged up in a single application.

Because 'engineering' is a different field, with a different software ecosystem? What's fascinating about it? It's pretty blatantly obvious, engineers pay Dassault through the nose for Solidworks because there are no real alternatives. The same is not true for programming.

If there was a high quality CAD server that was interfaced via plugins for programmable 3D editing software like Blender, then we can start making comparisons. Fact of the matter is that this isn't the case, not like what programmers have gotten in the last 20 years. It's absolutely not impossible for such a thing to exist, it just doesn't. Building things like high quality heuristics for the topological naming problem is quite hard.

It doesn't help that almost every IDE in existence these days is also not a real IDE. Visual Studio, Xcode, Jetbrains, etc. are just a more rigid programmable text editor, they lack the "I", and quite a bit of the "E". Compare them with things like LispWorks and Delphi, and the difference is stark. For the former category of "DE"s, there are often tools which are just as high quality, if not higher quality, elsewhere. Speaking as someone that uses a very wide variety of tools, including the ones mentioned, there's really not a lot of point to them unless you just really like their specific UI/UX.