Netbeans (and IDEs) as a crutch

[Matt Fielder]

Loaded NetBeans and walked through a tutorial.
I just put together a GUI to see how it worked.
To the people who know IDEs, is this going to hurt me?

I can write and have a decent general knowledge of Java and OOP design. I'm not still at "Hello World" but have never built a full blown app. I keep hearing that once you conquer "HW" you should move on to an IDE, but its PAINFULLY easy to see how you can use it as a crutch.

I had a working GUI together in minutes, yet wasn't once REQUIRED to actually touch code. When I finally looked at it, I realized how much of it I hadn't mastered. I'm not hesitant to go back and learn what it did for me, but damn, that was easy.

[Ilja Preuss]

I typically don't use IDEs as GUI builders, I handcode them. I haven't yet found an IDE that can generate GUI code I actually would want to maintain. And in fact, handcoding a GUI isn't that hard either, if you have some experience.

Still I heavily depend on my IDE of choice, Eclipse. It simply provides so many usefull tools to handle the code, that I would be orders of magnitude less productive without it. Think automated refactorings, automated fixes for compilation errors, code analysis and navigation etc. pp.