The speed of information technology's advance makes for some disconcertingly wide gulfs between the experiences of someone as ancient and venerable as I, and the younger engineers just starting out. These gulfs have been the subjects of many posts here over the years. Yesterday, I got fodder for yet another. In an email conversation, I mentioned to a young acquaintance, a software engineer in his late 20s, that it still felt “new” to me to be writing code in a modern IDE (for my non-geek readers, that stands for Integrated Development Environment, and programmers it's sort of like using a modern word processor instead of writing code with paper and pencil). My correspondent's reaction: “They didn’t always have IDEs? How could you write a program without one?” He wasn't trying to be funny – he really couldn't imagine how one could possibly write software without an IDE. When I explained to him what we did do, I don't think he believed me :)
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