Why use an IDE? [closed]

Question

This may be too opinionated, but what I'm trying to understand why some companies mandate the use of an IDE. In college all I used was vim, although on occasion I used netbeans for use with Java. Netbeans was nice because it did code completion and had some nice templates for configuration of some the stranger services I tried.

Now that my friends are working at big companies, they are telling me that they are required to use eclipse or visual studio, but no one can seem to give a good reason why.

Can someone explain to me why companies force their developers into restricted development environments?

Answer 1

IDE vs Notepad I've written code in lots of different IDEs and occasionally in notepad. You may totally love notepad, but at some point using notepad is industrial sabatoge, kind of like hiring a gardener who shows up with a spoon instead of a shovel and a thimble instead of a bucket. (But who knows, maybe the most beautiful garden can be made with a spoon and a thimble, but it sure isn't going to be fast)

IDE A vs IDE B Some IDE's have team and management features. For example, in Visual Studio, there is a screen that finds all the TODO: lines in source code. This allows for a different workflow that may or may not exist in other IDEs. Ditto for source control integration, static code analysis, etc.

IDE old vs IDE new Big organizations are slow to change. Not really a programming related problem.