Learn to Program by Understanding What an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Is

If you have never programmed before, or if you have only been programming for a short while, it’s not strange to wonder: How do computers do their magic, and how can I do it too? It’s not crazy either –even though it often is– to think that you could end up doing what hundreds and thousands of people do over a long time. Like everything else, until we realize it.

For someone who has never touched a programming language, the question above is not unanswerable; although answering it in detail would take hundreds of books. It’s like asking: How does a living being work? The question is simple, the answer not so much. Little by little.

But if you’re up for it, we can start with something that anyone with a computer can do, that carries no risk, that can give you a lot of knowledge, and that can lead to results no human could ever have achieved alone without this fabulous machine.

Back to the point. This can be achieved by having a place to work. Let’s say we want to build a wooden ship in a bottle. For that we need a workbench, which is an environment for building the ship. This environment will serve to develop the model in a "Workspace" meant for it -we’ll keep this "Workspace" term for the next tutorial. And to build the ship, our workbench must have all the necessary tools integrated, such as a saw, glue, a brush, etc. Now we’re ready to start building the ship, which will look great on the shelf.

Comparison of a good old workbench with an IDE. At heart they have always been the same thing, just the evolutionary leap

So, to write a program, the most convenient thing is to have an integrated development environment. Usually known by the acronym IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which we’ll use from now on.

You’re probably asking yourself: Can a single IDE be used to program in all existing programming languages? The answer couldn’t be more negative, I’m sorry, but it’s not the end of the world, and you’ll see why in other articles.

An IDE can serve many languages, but never all of them. You’ve surely heard of the most famous languages such as: C, Java, .NET, Phyton.

Since each language has different rights, exclusive technologies, and different devices where it can be run, it’s almost impossible for them all to be written with the same IDE.

You can write code in any text editor –after all, program code isn’t very different from a book: it tells a story that is going to be carried out. One of the best-known text editors for writing, and only writing, code is Notepad++, because it automatically lays out the text and colors it so it’s readable. But this is not an IDE, it’s a tool; it would be the equivalent of the saw in the previous example, and the rest of the utensils are missing for the writing to come to life.

Another question you may be asking is: What are all the tools that make up an IDE? And once again, you won’t like the answer, because the tools contained in each IDE aren’t exactly the same. Maybe you don’t need a saw but you do need a hammer, and so the workbench will have a hammer and no saw. Some of the most common tools that make up an IDE are:

• Text editor for writing code, with automatic correction of syntax errors.
• Compiler to translate the code written in the language into another one that the device where it runs is able to interpret.
• Debugger to fix errors while the program is running.
• Having the code tested automatically. This is achieved with so-called unit tests.
• Keeping a record of everything that has been done with a version control system.
• Having repetitive tasks run by themselves.
• Designing the windows the end user will see with a graphical interface builder.
• The ability to add plugins to extend the IDE’s features.

These are the most common ones, but an IDE doesn’t have to include all of them, and it may include others.

From this, you can understand that an IDE is a set of programming tools grouped into a single program, and those tools can be very different from one another. But let’s look at a famous one that lets you program in the most widely used languages.

One example is the famous Eclipse IDE, which is free and lets you program in a multitude of languages (you’ve surely heard of some of the following, which you can program and run in Eclipse: Java, Javascript, Rubi, HTML, PHP, XML, etc). To install Eclipse, I refer you to the following tutorial, which will explain the steps to follow.