I am a developer with a passion for testing. I've been coding for 14 years and I want to share my experience and learnings with other developers to help them write better software.
Jeroen is a Software Craftsmanship advocate with over 15 years of experience. He is CEO of https://pro.wiki. Previously Jeroen created Wikidata.org and was Software Architect at Wikimedia Deutschland.
Perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, at least not very much.
In my opinion using debuggers teaches you bad habits. You should not need a debugger. It is one of many things inside of PHPStorm that IMO you should not use. I've been using PHPStorm for years and not used the debugger for at least 4 now.
That said, I think junior devs, and all devs, should still use IDEs such as PHPStorm, to make sure they have access to:
Static analysis showing immediate feedback on bugs and code smells
Navigation capabilities such as "go to definition", "show all implementations", "find all usages", etc.
Strong auto-completion
Safe refactorings at least for basic things such as renaming stuff and inlining variables
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I think this is a more nuanced point. I started coding in notepad and I wouldn't advise anyone do that.
I think a clean install of Atom or Sublime is a better place to start than say PhpStorm.
I think there is a lot to be gained by debugging the old hard way rather than using tools to help you. To begin with at least.
Perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, at least not very much.
In my opinion using debuggers teaches you bad habits. You should not need a debugger. It is one of many things inside of PHPStorm that IMO you should not use. I've been using PHPStorm for years and not used the debugger for at least 4 now.
That said, I think junior devs, and all devs, should still use IDEs such as PHPStorm, to make sure they have access to: