Did you ever watch Norm Abrams, Master Carpenter in the TV program "New Yankee Workshop"? My carpenter father would have cringed to watch him making mortise & tenon joints using a router and jigs, but there is no doubt that he turns out workpieces much faster than my old man could. Could he do it by hand? Probably. The question is, why would he? And if the next generation of Master Carpenters can't, will their work be any the lesser for it?
When in the Army I was one of the last generations of artillery forward observers who were trained to their jobs with nothing more than binoculars, a map and compass. Now they use laser-rangefinders, GPS and electronic calculators and guess what happens when the batteries run out (and they always run out of batteries; it is the Army after all!)? You have to suspend the war until you can go out and buy fresh batteries.

The point I'm trying to make is that with all this assistance you risk loosing some basic skills "I don't have to learn the syntax as the IDE will correct my errors anyhow" and then you loose your grasp of the finer points of any language.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In reply to Re^9: Steve Yegge on how to build IDEs and improve speed of dynamic languages by CountZero
in thread Steve Yegge on how to build IDEs and improve speed of dynamic languages by zby

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