Early in my career, I was exposed to Microsoft languages like Visual Basic and C#. I was spoiled and didn’t know it.

I got so used to the IDE support, that it was pure pain to write in web languages like PHP or JavaScript, which had terrible IDE support back then, they were written in what was a piece of paper, it was even common to teach JavaScript in Notepad.

Sublime Text

After a while, things improved and light editors became popular.

Sublime Text was the king, everybody was using it for its blazing-fast startup time, simplicity, and what I loved the most: multi cursor 👌. The multi-cursor was love at first sight, I cannot express how much I’m in love with that feature, I feel so damn productive, it’s so accommodated to my way of thinking and typing I cannot imagine myself without it.

But all things come to an end and after a while, Sublime started to fall short for me, I needed more power but was unaware of a better free editor, the only other I knew with decent support was DreamWeaver 👀.

I took a break from web development and went to Video Games, where I programmed Unity3d with C#, Unity was still fairly new, and their integration with C# was very rudimentary, however, C# was love, so sophisticated, and that damn IntelliSense, those perfect refactors, mmm, the feeling of a good IDE support, it’s like eating chocolate cake every day.

How does good IDE support feel like?

For me, the highlight of coding on the Microsoft ecosystem was the languages felt like something concrete, almost physical. The understanding of them by the IDE didn’t felt like writing by hand where I could type errors, it felt how it should, a formal language, typing feels like a highly sophisticated configuration of well-defined pieces (methods, functions, classes).

Writing in a language with good IDE support feels like programming with extra hands, the IDE does so much for you, and you only configure/type at a very high level, no need to memorize all the methods from String or Array, just a couple of strokes and the auto-complete pops up with the right answer, every single time.

Also, IntelliSense is a masterpiece that I abused until I started to work fulltime in web development.

#elixir #javascript #fsharp #programming #microsoft