The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition (2023)

When the first version came out, around the time I got my first job, it felt like everyone around me had read this book, and for a long time we were throwing around quotes from this book. Sadly after a few years it felt like the only thing that really stuck in the larger community was "Don't Repeat Yourself", which wasn't really something that at the time stood out as much more important than many of the other "rules".

My personal favorite was always the one about "English is just a programming language", but when I read the 20th anniversary edition that one seemed like it had been toned down? I did not go back to find the original one to compare, but the way I remember it it was pretty hardcore about keeping text as text and using tools like for programming (use macros in text to avoid repeating yourself etc).

Overall the 20th anniversary did feel a bit less idealistic? I guess for a "pragmatic" book that makes sense, but I remember the original like it was making stronger arguments for or against things. I really liked the (anti-)IDE chapter, or the parts on the importance of learning how to use a good text editor well, for instance, but now they basically cut that out. Did give me the impression that they were trying to be down with the kids at times.

That's because being strongly opinionated about anything nowadays is viewed down.

But was it actually changed? Or was it a memory of a strong opinion that upon re-read years later, wasn't that strong of an opinion?

I am curious if they did change that much, or it is just peoples memory and nostalgia playing into the impression.

Well, cutting the IDE out may happen because IDEs improved.

AFAIK, all the hate from IDEs at the time came from the way Eclipse and the Microsoft ones work, and all the love came from the Borland ones. As Borland failed, the "correct" opinion became obvious, but it was actually only correct by accident and didn't reflect any inherent properties of the software.

Twenty years ago, I was strongly anti IDE and pro text editor. In the last ~10 years or so text editors have gained features previously only found in IDEs and IDEs have improved their performance and brought in features from text editors. I would argue the distinction between text editors and IDEs at this point is academic.

The main difference is "IDEs" typically contain custom, ad hoc text editors in them. They don't allow you to build transferable skills that can be used to edit any text. People who use them will typically use some other editor to make documents, another one for their notes, and one per programming language.

I started using Emacs 15+ years ago because you can easily make it into an IDE, but it works for any text. Essentially it's like learning to use a kitchen knife vs buying a mincer, a grater, a food processor, a mandolin, and whatever other single-purpose tools they're peddling at the kitchen shop today.

Since then, the Emacs way has caught on. I see stuff like Atom and VSCode as just vastly inferior forms of Emacs. They can all be text editors or IDEs if you want them to be.

>People who use them will typically use some other editor to make documents, another one for their notes, and one per programming language.

I'll never be convinced that that is a bad thing. And honestly, by the time you make emacs have the features that dedicated editors have, it's not emacs anymore anyway.