When Just Works, Just Fails

I have a rough history with IDEs. It seems like every time that I try to use one it seems to get in the way more then it helps me. Generally I eschew the monstrosities for that exact reason. I have tried Netbeans, Eclipse, various Visual Studios, IDLE and probably many others. Generally my development environment consists of gVIM, bash, cscope and GNU make. Some might think me a little crazy to do things the "hard way" but I like the control it gives me.

Case in point, just for fun, last night I started working on an Android application. I installed the proper plug-in for Eclipse and started hacking away at the android version of "hello world". Well after writing the code I began to try to run it on the G1 simulator and "It Just Works" didn't. For the next four or so hours I was banging my head up against the opaque build process. Finally I fixed the problem. It was my own fault for skipping a step in the installation of the tools. Now I am not claiming that doing things with make, ant or whatever would have been any faster. However I feel like those hours are wasted because I don't really know anything more about the build environment. Had I been using my usual method of development I would probably have learned the entire build process in that time.

I am not recommending that you ditch your IDE "to each his own". But every developer should at sometime do at least a toy project the hard way. Learn how building works it will make you a better programmer in the long run. Once you do that learn your favorite IDE's build process, what tools it uses and how it invokes them. Then when something breaks you will better know how to fix it and will waste less time banging your head against "It Just Works".