There are free IDEs for all languages on all platforms. You never have to be without it.
If you take programming seriously and do it for a living, you're going to HAVE to use an IDE.
I am not trying to be argumentative, and don't dispute your insistence on the use of an IDE, it can often be helpful and very powerful. However, I don't feel that the generalities that you are making apply as broadly as you seem to be insisting.
1) All platforms? There may be a way for me to forward an X-session from a 10 year old PA-RISC HP-UX 11.0 machine and run Eclipse on it (if i can get a modern JRE running on it), but even if could I don't know if our customers would appreciate using one of the two cores in the machine to do so. Just running gdb(Wildebeest variant from HP) from the command line seems more prudent. I'm also not so sure if Eclipse, or any other free (or non-free?) IDEs I could run on this sort of machine support fortran 77/90/95*... which leads into...
2) All languages? I'm not sure if there are IDEs for bash, and if so i can't imagine what benefit one would derive from them. A programmer's text editor with syntax highlighting is all that makes sense to me. Professionally I could probably find IDEs for the other languages in use regularly (fortran, C, C#, Java, perl, bash, SQL, some ruby, python, etc.), but for the non-OO ones I would not derive sufficient benefit from doing so.
3) "If you take programming seriously...". Careful there, that's moving from a spirited, informed technical conversation into personal territory. I'm a professional (both in behavior and for-pay, employed status) software developer/engineer/architect/what-have-you and take programming incredibly seriously. I pursued Computer Science academically, program professionally, program recreationally, research languages, methodologies, technologies, etc. for fun as well as what is required of me professionally, etc. I am sure there are other people that take programming seriously and are paid to do so that for technical, cultural, political, etc. reasons rarely use an IDE.
The point here is not that IDEs are bad. The point is that there are real situations that preclude their use (embedded systems programming, debugging customer problems on underpowered or locked down equipment, banging out quick scripts, etc.), and means of being productive without their use. They are
great when you can use them and it makes sense. I just feel that if one has no idea what's happening underneath the IDE, they're missing a lot of things.
I am just promoting my personal view of the virtues of versatility. Sometimes there's only a shell prompt and <phone systems down, financial transactions failing, stop lights blinking red/yellow, doctors waiting on stat test results>... are you going to go grab another engineer that's comfortable dealing with it, or will you be the one people go to?
The moral is, use the best tool for the job, and know what the best tool is, and understand that the best tool for you isn't necessarily the best tool for someone else. Be flexible.
-Lee
*It turns out I may be wrong:
http://www.eclipse.org/photran/
I still don't know if i could get it running on these machines, and our support department would probably rue me doing so when they started getting calls about performance from customers.
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