The integrated development environment (IDE) is an indispensable tool for software developers. Before it came along, coding was a laborious, detail ladened undertaking. We’ve become accustomed to the syntax checking and code completion features than even the most basic IDEs provide. These days we tend to forget how hard it was programming with nothing but a rudimentary text editor. Something as simple as finding a missing comma or a misplaced curly bracket that was causing a compilation error could take hours, maybe days should the codebase be big enough. When it came to tracing your way through a seemingly endless chain of functions and classes in order to find the culprit of a runtime error, well…fuggedaboutit! Without the modern IDE, we’d be sunk.
[Source: DevOps.com]
