Integrated Development Environment

Coding can be as simple as opening a notepad file and typing the commands. However, it is not a convenient solution for many even professional developers. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) are created to make the process easier by combining a set of tools to write, compile, debug, and test the codes in a single environment.

Turbo Pascal was probably the first programming language that shipped with a floppy disk containing a custom text editor, a compiler, and all the functionality that was needed to produce executable programs. With more memory, coding was both an issue of text and visual representation. Visual Basic arrived in 1991 as the first IDE. It was followed by Delphi, a Pascal-based IDE, where programmers could design and code as well as debug and test in one program.

IDEs helped lower the bar to entry to programming with their relatively easy-to-use setup. The first language-agnostic IDEs on the market, Visual Studio, arrived in 1997. Right now, Microsoft’s Visual Studio continues to dominate the field, closely followed by the open-source Eclipse Foundation and Google’s Android Studio in a distant third. After that, however, is a long tail of smaller and smaller IDEs.

The actual makeup of an IDE depends on the programming language, type of projects, and your needs, but there are some things that are common among a lot of IDEs, such as:

Code editor
Command-line interface (CLI) - build, execution, and debugging tools
Version control system
Package manager

You can also find IDEs available for different scenarios, where these four components, and probably many more tools, are combined already and will be available upon installation. However, starting with simple development tools help you to learn the basics quickly and build your own developing environment based on your needs.

In the next sections of this workshop, we learn about different parts of an IDE with a focus on Visual Studio Code as a code editor with many extra features.