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Language servers are certainly a big improvement. However there's a different between "there exists" and "this is a community priority". In some language communities the developers use IDEs, they like IDEs and they make IDEs a priority. In other communities there's one or two people who like them, kinda, and maintain a plugin. Let's put it this way, I don't see OCaml moving to a query based compiler anytime soon.

I'm not sure I agree with the no-IDE part. It feels very "Plato complaining about the invention of writing". Human working memory is quite narrow and quite fickle. If you step away from a codebase for a while, or you're learning it for the first time, an IDE can really help with your bearings. I agree that code should be broken up into contexts and well organized, but I don't think the editor should be the forcing function here.

And IDEs are great! Goto definition that works even in complicated situations unlike ctags; inline type inference; generating imports. I don't begrudge someone using emacs or vim (2nd generation emacs user) but I gotta say, IDEs work wonders.

As for who I'd recruit, I think it's a false dichotomy to say that the alternative is "people who copy/paste from stack overflow and get lost without autocomplete". There's plenty of great, legit developers who can write you a custom serialization library in nano, but choose to use IntelliJ and packages because it gets the job done.

I don't mean to denigrate the OCaml, Haskell or Lisp communities. I wish more people wrote them! But I also recognize that these languages went from secret weapons to, well, a valid option in a trade off matrix. I'd still love to work at Jane Street, although between this comment and my application record, that may be a pipe dream.




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