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>how do you always rename the correct ones, in every location, and never accidentally rename the wrong ones?

Well to start, you limit the scope in which they are used so that you only use one such object per file, and you import it with a different name if you've got to mix them. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do regardless of whether you have an IDE or not.

>How on earth do you find all usages of a particular function with only a regex in anything other than a small codebase with only a few developers?

Rename it and try to compile. :)

I don't have anything serious against IDEs. They're pretty awesome when they are well-maintained and reliable. I just don't think they're all upside. For one, when I was first learning Java and I'd get a compile error due to packaging or import conflicts, the IDE only served to remind me that I was incompetent about how Java actually worked. And learning the IDE meant learning a lot about what the IDE wants in its particular configuration, not what the actual Java compiler needed.

Moreover, if you ever move to a language that doesn't have as high degree of IDE support as Java, you start having to fight with it quite a bit, and many of those wonderful features aren't available, don't work well, or actively undermine your process.

If what you are doing is old news and part of an active "enterprise-y" code process, then it does reduce friction. Otherwise, it can be a source of friction unto itself.




>If what you are doing is old news and part of an active "enterprise-y" code process, then it does reduce friction. Otherwise, it can be a source of friction unto itself.

I don't understand this statement. What does having an "enterprise-y" code process have to do with anything?


I wrote a programming language. Nobody uses it. Therefore, it has no IDE support, and trying to use it in an IDE will be a frustrating waste of your time.

Someone else wrote a language. It powers 100 trillion dollars of business. Lots of people use it. Therefore, it will have ten IDEs all competing with each other to be the best, fastest, most popular, and least buggy.

In which environment are you going to use an IDE?




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