IDEA has ruined me.
IDEA has ruined me. Oh the shift-f6. Now whenever I write perl, or elisp, or bash scripts, or DOS scripts or whatever, I want to be able to change variable names and function names, and have all of their references changed in one step. And also the debugger. And the error highlighting and the refactoring.
I am certain that I've saved the entire cost of IDEA in a single day of development. Many times. I imagine the same goes for the rest of our development staff.
I had an interesting chat about these issues with an Emacs zealot a few months ago. I said, basically, "Emacs can't keep up with specialized apps like this; it's still my favorite general text editor, but it's been surpassed as a development environment". He completely disagreed with me. "Emacs can do anything!".
No. He's wrong. Sure, technically the magic of open source could put a Java compiler into elisp, and implement multithreading so that compiles happen constantly in the background, and everyone could try to perfect all the features that IDEA has... sure, that's all possible. But come on now.
In other news, I snowboarded for the first time yesterday. I hurt. It's the pain of skateboarding all over again... but in the cold.
While I was waiting for the lift, two people skiied by with orange tags over their jackets: "BLIND SKIIER" and "GUIDE". Goddamn. You go.