Horses for courses vs degrees of autonomy
Fun article, albeit an obvious troll.
As ever, despite all the protests from various camps (mine included), the answer is that there is no one best solution.
Some people like a simple editor and the command line. They can be productive that way. Some people like a shiny IDE. Some, like me, are content to use either/both as appropriate.
As someone mentioned above, if you're running a couple windows with editor, debugger and build output, you are using an IDE. Even more so if you have build scripts/macros. It's just that your brain is doing some of the 'I' part.
In an ideal (from a codemonkey's point of view) world, each individual developer or team of developers would have the autonomy to select an appropriate CPU architecture, OS, language and/or compiler and sundry other development tools such as editors, build tools, source control systems, etc, etc for each project that they are faced with.
In the real world, unless you are an indy (and even then you may well face constraints due to client requirements), or work for a very small shop, you are unlikely to have that degree of autonomy.
There are good reasons for this which have fuck all to with 'vendor lock in', corporations with even small dev teams require standards. While the corporate codemonkeys may chafe at being treated like cogs in a machine, that is, in fact, exactly what they are.
It's no good if one member of the dev team, is using one krufty lump of ad hocery while the others use something else, possibly each their own KLoAH. I've seen shops that try and work like this, very few get away with it, usually it is a disaster waiting to happen. Someone gets sick or leaves and some vital bit of process knowledge is lost forever. Having a standard, repeatable, documented process is more important than some whining beardy fucktard's preference for vi, or indeed some mouthy recently graduated drone's obsession with Visual Studio. Or a drooling moron's preference for Eclipse, the second most bloated, ponderous and ungainly IDE in the universe (Monodevelop, in case you were wondering)
Those of us lucky enough to have the autonomy to chose should do so based on what seems to be most productive and appropriate, ideally we should get some metrics to prove it, but that rarely, if ever, happens in practice. Academia, yes, practice, no.
Here's a handy hint for anyone who feels like they're somehow 'locked in to' or forced to use an IDE that they think is not appropriate : Try and write a compelling business case that illustrates why this is so. When you fail, you will understand why your development process looks the way it does. On the off chance that you succeed, well, job done. Grab yourself a boss chair and a business card order form. Attaboy.
Basically, if you're in a position to chose, you've got nothing to complain about and a world of alternatives. If you're not in a position to chose, there is most likely an excellent reason why not. If you don't like not being in a position to chose, you made a poor career choice somewhere along the line.
High skills shops can be more tolerant of individual coder styles, corporate sweat shops and internal IT functions rarely fit this description.
MS and Oracle's big dev tools - who needs 'em?
