What Is an Ide or Integrated Development Environment?

Wondering what an IDE is? Find out everything you need to know about Integrated Development Environments.

I used to ask myself this question every night before going to sleep… An IDE, Integrated Development Environment, is an Integrated Development Environment… Doubt solved…!

But what is an Integrated Development Environment? It is a program created among many programmers to offer a tool that allows us to create new applications or web pages… But, what is a web page…? Well, that's enough…!

An IDE allows you to maximize your productivity as a programmer, facilitating the development of software in several ways that we will explore below:

Programming

Programmers commonly use an IDE to write, test and debug their programs according to precise standards. For this, it includes different tools such as text editors, debuggers or visual interfaces adapted to various programming languages.

Files such as .txt, .json, .js, .ts, .java, .kt, .md and .html, can be edited with an IDE. It can also be a stand-alone application that serves as an environment for other command-line based tools, such as compilers (a software that translates a program written in a high-level programming language into machine language) and interpreters (a computer program capable of parsing and executing other programs).

All this sounds very "meta". That's why so many programmers believe that we live in a simulation: They are the ones who live among permanent synecdoches…! It's not an insult, don't worry…

Functions

The three main functions of Integrated Development Environments: Code editor, automation tools, and debugger (or debugger).

Most IDEs already have an intelligent code completer, for the laziest of the class…. For example, the new GitHub Copilot uses artificial intelligence to help you finish your code. But is it still your code…? And what will the next generations of programmers learn? If they already have their robot mommy (or GitHub Copilot) doing everything for them…

Examples

Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom, or Vim are some of the most common IDE examples. And if you want to program with Python:PyCharm, PyDev and Spyder are the most popular IDEs…

And if you didn't understand anything in this article I recommend the course by Rodrigo Montemayor (@ringatech) who will teach you how to use Python in his introduction to programming course or Yannick Gregoire (@yannickgregoire) who will teach you the basics of creative web design and building interactive pages from scratch with HTML, CSS and JavaScript in his HTML, CSS and JavaScript course for beginners.

And there are still more programming courses…! But, be careful… Don't deform the spacetime unintentionally, with your powerful code… (I'm sorry to give free rein to your fantasies…!):

- Join our programming courses
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