David Vallner wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> Where I think an IDE is absolutely crucial is two places:
>>
>> 1. Dealing with large quantities of other peoples' code
> 
> Amen. All the arguments about code being equally easy to manipulate if
> you follow good conventions and clean design without an IDE are
> completely void in the "fix a pile of hacks a student coder learning the
> language was allowed to let loose into a production system" scenario.
> 
> These scenarios are also unfortunately very common, and usually done on
> time schedules of maintenance releases, where a full rewrite of a
> component that works is out of the question.
Ah, but in my younger days I *could* completely rewrite a few thousand
lines of someone else's spaghetti code faster than I could figure out
what the original was doing. Then again, there were only two programming
languages -- FORTRAN and assembler.:)