Software Engineering Tool’s and Old School
In many ways I wonder if certain tooling are making software engineers lazy. Specifically, living in an IDE sometimes causes one to fail to understand the magic the IDE does to hide the underlying interaction with the source control system, or unit test runner. If the IDE breaks, software engineers stand around in some cases lost as to how to move forwards until the IDE is “fixed”. The old school way of doing development was with an editor (e.g. vi) and the command line. Today I feel software engineers shy away from the command line, which I correlate to the effect I saw with the uptake of Java in the early days – software engineers went from a C++ world of knowing (possibly) how the OS worked to the VM world of not really caring about how the OS work with regards to thread and more. Progress comes in many forms
On a final note, the JavaScript world correlates to the Old School era, primarily due to the lack of IDE tooling that has become the norm for .NET and Java software engineers. This has in some cases forced the abandoning of IDE’s for a tool chains based on pure editors and the command line – a light weight development experience with full control, others in the JavaScript world struggle due to lack of IDE tooling.
