SICP's co-author

Interview with Hal Abelson.

http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/

Long shit.

Abelson: Yeah, well, that’s it. We’re making all this hairy stuff. One of the
things that I’ve started to understand in these languages is the incredible
importance of the development environment. I couldn’t even begin to
program in Java without Eclipse. I mean, it’s just such an enormously
complex thing, and you are using imports and libraries and interfaces so
much. I wouldn’t know how to manage it without an IDE. That’s the thing
that I didn’t appreciate enough before coming to a place like Google.

Hal Abelson, writing code in Java (for Google) and using Eclipse.

>>3
What other way to program is there?

Wasn't he the one who said excessive complexity was a bad thing, in SICP? Or would that be The Sussman?

>>4
Hacking C/C++/assembly with notepad++ running on wine, a tabbed command shell terminal, a web browser for documentation and cgdb for debugging. Two displays minimum. Three recommended. I'm running a ThinkPad T520 with a 1080p display and a Dell U2410 for my secondary.

One of the things that I’ve started to understand in these languages is the incredible importance of the development environment.

Another example of how the people who say "I just need a termial, vi/emacs, make, gcc, and gdb" are out of touch.  Once you go out in the real world and try to write ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE, you quickly realize how shitty those tools are.

I can code functional Java in plain text editors with no problem.  Actually requiring Eclipse is an admission of something lacking.

>>5
The Abelson said a lot of good things, then he betrayed all of us.

>>8
Shouldn't be a requirement, but when dealing with repetitive verbose languages like Java, the right tools do help.