I’m a relatively young programmer by most people’s standards. Ever since I got started about 10 years ago, I’ve been coding in Notepad. Now I use Dreamweaver, which is essentially the same except that it color-codes my work for me and has a built-in FTP function. I’ve tried several IDEs, numerous PHP editors, and “make your life easier” tools in every color of the rainbow, but they inevitably frustrate me. Why do I find it so difficult to give up the familiar?
Lately I’ve been under a lot of pressure to switch to ZendStudio or something similar. Debugging, profiling, optimizing, and documentation tools abound! It has a million and one ways to make your code better. But when push comes to shove, I’ll stick with my text editor any day. Why? Two reasons…
Lately I’ve been under a lot of pressure to switch to - I like control. It seems to me that Zend, as well as many other IDEs (integrated development environments), can do anything shy of curing cancer. But I can’t help but feel that its all just a farce for not knowing how to code well. I’d rather learn to optimize my own code then let some software do it for me. It’s a harder road, but I prefer it. Otherwise my skills are no longer portable and my growth as a developer is essentially at a stand-still – I’m dependent on a single piece of software. If you can’t do the same thing in Notepad that you can do in Zend, then you’ve moved backward, not forward. And don’t give me that “it helps you code faster” crap. If you have to re-write code constantly, then learn to make your code more portable.
- I dislike bulk. Is it just me, or are most commercially-available tools very heavy? The problem with all-in-one tools is that they inevitably clutter things up with substantially more than what the average programmer needs. The same can be said of Dreamweaver I suppose, but it has never gotten to the point that it gets in my way.
I can’t decide if I’m stubborn or just too much of a control freak. But for now, I work in government and I have yet to kill any servers or bring about the apocalypse. What is your opinion on development environments and tools?
