Sais no-one that knows vim, thou it have a vi-like mode that is missing most advanced vi-trixs.

A good IDE also helps you make better refactoring, making the code so much easier to read. The main goal of any code.

I blame the rise of frameworks, libraries, and IDEs

Without good libraries and frameworks, we can hardly get any software working in today’s environment. We get stuck with a slow development cycle and have software that doesn’t do what the users want of it. A few years ago, I was at a customer using an old Linux distribution at their customer’s site. For contractual reasons that was not upgrading to the latest version, they had skipped keeping up to date with changes as they came. Every step of development became a hassle and the good programmers there were not able to deliver features at any predictable rate. There were issues with HTTPS, most webservers of today mandate at least TLS1.2, but when the OS only supports SSLv2 and SSLv3, and TLS1.1, connecting to the internet, well gets hard.

Having to develop all functionality from the ground up, makes no features needed by the customers ever released. With most developers I have worked with using good libraries also makes the implementations less prone to have serious bugs in them.

I assume you never worked in testing. back in the days, we used to cram testing into a weekend as developers were late with their coding. There was no test automation so that weekend we spend all the time on the most basic functionality. Barely getting thou the testing of having the app started and some of the most basic functions. Almost never was there any time for regression testing, old functions broke all the time. It wasn’t uncommon that we skipped a bug fix in one version, just to reintroduce the same bug in the next release.

It seems to me that the author doesn’t remember all the struggles we had back then with bugs and features not working. And masses of needed functionality that never got skipped into the hands of users. It also strikes me that maybe there is a bit of nostalgia, just a bit of reluctance to change his ways. He found a workflow around the missing functionality that might be blocking for others and he has a harder time adjusting to the new functionality.

A bit like my father that refused to change his workflow, to make images for webpages (all static) he used for different Amiga programs because one could scale the images, one could edit them add lines and stuff, one for helping him make image maps, and they one so they could be converted to jpg/png as anim files used by everything else on the amiga didn’t work well on the internet.

Bug testing back then was awful, we never had time to catch any issues but the biggest. The time plan for the release was fixed years ahead, the functionality that was needed was fixed years ahead. All the needed time for testing was eaten up by the developers working into the final skip to customers, trying to make the software actually run. It wasn’t uncommon for test teams trying to cramp months of eating into a weekend to have the software skipped on Monday morning. Well including masses of needed bug fixes during that weekend that no one knew what code each issue was actually tested on. Remember that software version control system was almost not used, there was no CI build system all all software was built on some random developers workstation. Maybe, with some additional changes for his or her convenience. No software development has come a long way since the 90s. A very long way!