15
votes

This has nothing to do with having a favourite editor or anything like that. I was just wondering, per language, what are the most popular Integrated Development Environments? Maybe a top 2-3 if there is some contention. (Perceived popularity is enough)

Thus Far:

C# - Visual Studio, SharpDevelop

Java - Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA

Objective-C - Xcode

Delphi - RAD Studio

Object Pascal - Delphi, Lazarus

C, C++ - Visual Studio, Vim

PL/SQL - RapidSQL, Oracle SQLDeveloper

PHP - Eclipse, NetBeans, Nusphere PHPed

Actionscript (AS2, AS3) - FlashDevelop

Flex - Flash Builder 4

Python - Eclipse, IDLE

Perl - Padre

Common Lisp - Lispworks, Emacs

Ruby - TextMate

Haskell - Vim

Fortran - Vim

Visual Basic - Visual Studio

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  • 1
    Is this a bit too broad?
    – MIA
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 15:40
  • 1
    @Jim, why too broad? Just a question that lists IDEs, not compares and describes them.
    – P Shved
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 15:44
  • 4
    One way to treat this question would be to list one language/IDE pair per answer and let the # of upvotes gauge popularity.
    – Adam Lear ♦
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 19:00
  • 2
    If this is going to become a voting thing it should be Community Wiki
    – WalterJ89
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 19:09
  • 3
    I agree that this should be community-wiki, not because it's a poll, but just because it's broad enough that it wouldn't make sense to have multiple answers for each language, so anyone should be able to edit them.
    – Gelatin
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 16:21

33 Answers 33

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18
votes

All languages - VIM

I don't like IDE's.

If I'm on OSX I'll use TextMate at time, but mostly I do everything (JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP) in VIM. I'm also quicker then several colleagues who use an IntelliJ.

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  • 8
    I'm a bit disappointed it didn't say emacs, but +1 nevertheless. ^^
    – gablin
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 18:01
  • 5
    It asks what are the most popular IDEs, not which one you use.
    – Andrew Grimm
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 23:41
  • 3
    @Andrew: Half the Zend dev team uses VIM. I doubt it's "unpopular" by any stretch.
    – Josh K
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 21:02
  • Can do you debugging from VIM, is that possible?
    – Jon Onstott
    Commented Nov 17, 2010 at 22:37
  • @Jon: Sure, and the perl debugger can even drive plain old vi, the real one, that Keith Bostic wrote.
    – tchrist
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 0:38
13
votes

Java - IDEA, Eclipse, NetBeans.

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  • 4
    In that order? If so, do you have a source? I would have thought it was Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA or NetBeans, Eclipse, IDEA...
    – Chinmay Kanchi
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:27
  • 7
    to my understanding Eclipse is the most popular for Java itself.
    – WalterJ89
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 17:06
  • 1
    @Chinmay Kanchi: Then I consider this question a success already!
    – Steven Evers
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 20:12
  • 1
    @Chinmay - I listed them in order of my personal preference :) In fact, I would always prefer IDEA over the others.
    – user1539
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 4:20
  • 4
    Walter's right: Eclipse is probably the most popular. IntelliJ IDEA is the best one though. :-)
    – Jonik
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 17:57
10
votes

Ruby

There's a question in the Hampton's Ruby Survey that may provide some concrete numbers about the "text editor" of preference in the Ruby world. Here's a chart of the results (at the time of writing):

A chart of the results for the "text editor of preference" question of the Hampton's Ruby Survey

The results suggest that TextMate is the most popular text editor among Ruby developers. It is worth noting that TextMate's popularity seems to be declining; so is the popularity of Eclipse based editors. On the other hand, the popularity of Vim, which I personally use, seems to be increasing.

2
  • +1 Nice graph, much quicker to parse than the source page
    – Alan Pearce
    Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 15:07
  • 2
    Vim is gaining! More power to the engines, don't let them get away!
    – Mark C
    Commented Nov 23, 2010 at 5:21
6
votes

Objective-C - Xcode

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  • 5
    What else can you write Obj-C in?!
    – Alex Feinman
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 18:01
  • Is that a question or just rhetorical?
    – Mark C
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 4:35
  • 1
    @Alex: ProjectCenter and ProjectManager under GNUstep, TextEdit under OpenStep, and emacs on pretty much anything all have Objective-C syntax support. There's a stillborn project to do Objective-C for Eclipse, which failed because the CDT didn't support ObjC.
    – user4051
    Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 14:45
  • Syntax support doesn't make for an IDE; it's necessary but not sufficient. I was quite curious to see if there were any other full-fledged IDEs for Obj-C; sounds like there may not be, yet.
    – Alex Feinman
    Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 15:58
  • Objective-C does exist besides Mac doesnt it? As such, I'd think that its Cocoa that is so tightly coupled so Xcode, not necessarily Objective-C. I'm kind of conjecturing tho, I am not a serious Objective-C coder by any means.
    – jon_darkstar
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 4:00
5
votes

For Delphi, the Delphi IDE.

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  • I don't recall there being a choice ;-) But I wish there was (at least for Delphi 7) Whoops, there go my blue dots, time to restart.
    – Peter Turner
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 17:30
  • @Peter: Well, there's always Lazarus... :P
    – Mason Wheeler
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 17:33
  • Technically Objective Pascal... Blue dots?
    – Mark C
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 4:32
  • 1
    @Mark C: Dots in the gutter at the side of the editor that indicate where lines of executable code are. They show where the debugger will stop when you're tracing through the code, and where the valid lines to set breakpoints on are. There were some glitches in earlier IDEs that could break this functionality, though.
    – Mason Wheeler
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 4:45
4
votes

Common Lisp

Commercially, probably LispWorks.

Outside of the commercial implementations, almost certainly EMACS + SLIME

0
4
votes

C++: Visual Studio with Visual Assist X

3
votes

Java - Eclipse (Java EE, with Google App Eng, and GWT, and Plug-in for Version Control)

C++ - EMacs/Eclipse/GEdit

GEdit does a pretty good just at color coding most languages.

3
votes

Erlang - Emacs

3
votes

C --- Emacs

3
votes

Everyone I know working with Python uses Emacs or Vim.

1
  • I use PyDev, but then I'm really working with Jython.
    – user4051
    Commented Nov 3, 2010 at 14:46
3
votes

For both Perl and Python: Emacs and Vim. Beats Eclipse in terms of popularity.

2
votes

For PHP there is also Nusphere PHPed which is absolutely great, not free but one of the best. I used to use it all the time.

For Haskell I would say vim,and that probably goes for C too.

2
votes

Object Pascal - Delphi, Lazarus

C,C++ - Bloodshed Dev C++ , Visual Studio 2008 C++

PL/SQL - RapidSQL (by Embarcadero), Oracle SQLDeveloper

C# - Visual Studio (Currently in 2008, but 2010 looks sweet when I upgrade!)

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  • 2
    For the record, Dev-C++ is more than a little out of date. It includes MinGW-GCC 3.4, while the current release of MinGW-GCC is 4.5. wxDev-C++ supposedly comes with a more recent compiler, although I would say there are fer better alternatives.
    – greyfade
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 20:46
  • 1
    ---> CodeBlocks
    – Mark C
    Commented Oct 5, 2010 at 23:01
2
votes

Visual Basic - Visual Studio
C++, Fortran - Visual Studio, Vim, Emacs

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  • Are you saying that Vim,Emacs are among the most popular IDEs for C#? I somehow doubt that.
    – JohnFx
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:04
  • I agree with vim about C++ definitely not C#. For c# there's visual studio and you can't really get anything better imho.
    – Daniel
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:22
  • How could you list vim and emacs for C# and C++ and not for Python. I would have thought more Python programmers use them than C# programmers.
    – Chinmay Kanchi
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:28
  • @JohnFx - You're right. An error on my part.
    – Rook
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:33
  • @Chinmay Kanchi - An error on my part in regard to C#. As for Python, I had a feeling these are more used.
    – Rook
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 16:34
1
vote

Java - Eclipse, NetBeans

Python - IDLE? (Ships by default, don't know about popularity)

Perl - Padre

3
  • Why would anyone ever want any other IDE than vi for perl?
    – tchrist
    Commented Nov 20, 2010 at 0:39
  • @tchrist: The fact that it was made from scratch to be an IDE for perl indicates that there are people who want it
    – Daenyth
    Commented Nov 21, 2010 at 2:21
  • That doesn’t answer my question. Why would they want it?
    – tchrist
    Commented Nov 21, 2010 at 2:25
1
vote

I'm not sure, but I would say that the most popular in Python is Eclipse + pyDev

Everyone Ruby programmer I know uses TextMate in MacOS

2
  • What about non-Mac Ruby programmers?
    – Mark C
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 4:25
  • Curiously, any Rubist I know is absolutely a Mac fan! (and uses also vi when they have to use other machines)
    – Khelben
    Commented Oct 11, 2010 at 8:24
1
vote

Was never really a fan of an IDE and find I learn the language better without the assistance. VIM was mentioned but at times I really am not interested in VIM and would rather use nano.

Nano Editor

1
vote

Actionscript(AS2,AS3) - FlashDevelop

1
vote

PHP

Actual PHP programming - Netbeans (PHP version) or Eclipse (PHP Development Tools)
PHP Templating - Dreamweaver

Note - By actual PHP programing I mean (for example) OOP using frameworks like CakePHP, Symfony or CodeIgniter.
By templating I mean using simple PHP for including headers/footers or formatting.

12
  • Netbeans also has a nice Vim plug-in I hear, for those of you who love vim. I've never used it myself
    – WalterJ89
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 17:33
  • I started using Eclipse for Java, but was initially reluctant to use it for PHP. I've since been quite happy with it, especially for Drupal development.
    – gapple
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 18:29
  • 1
    I also see Komodo appear frequently in IDE discussion in the Drupal community.
    – gapple
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 18:30
  • 1
    "PHP Eclipse" would be more accurate then "Eclipse", the PHP Eclipse package includes all the tool you need to develop PHP.
    – HoLyVieR
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 18:32
  • @HoLtView Made the change,
    – WalterJ89
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 18:39
1
vote

JetBrains has IDE's for several languages that have a similar look & feel:

IntelliJ IDEA for Java

RubyMine for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

PHPStorm for PHP, HTML and JavaScript

PyCharm for Python and Django

(I have the last three.)

1
vote

C++ - code::blocks

1
  • I belive Code::Blocks is one of the best IDEs for C++, however, it's kinda struggling with acceptance. It won't beat VisualStudio on Windows. However, with declining popularity of Eclipse, Code::Blocks might get another chance.
    – polemon
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 22:12
1
vote

One IDE that has been forgotten: Aptana - Eclipse based IDE for PHP, Ruby, Javascript and Python.

0
votes

Mine

.Net (3.5) - Visual studio 2008 .net 4 - visual studio 2010

flex - flash builder 4 / eclipse Java - Eclipse

ROR - TextMate HTML/CSS/JS etc - TextMate

0
votes

C# / Mono - I'd add MonoDevelop. Cross platform, so you have a C# IDE on Linux and Mac as well as Windows.

1
  • I was going to add MonoDevelop but I thought I heard that it had problems and couldn't compile against .NET?
    – Steven Evers
    Commented Sep 22, 2010 at 0:18
0
votes

C/C++ - Visual Studio C# - Visual Studio Java - Depends. I use java mostly for mobiles, so, for example, Blackberry I use the Blackberry JDE, for any other J2ME mobile, Java ME SDK 3. I once used JCreator PRO to develop, one, when i didnt knew specified tools existed to code for mobiles, xDDDDD JavaScript - Visual Studio, and that's cause i use mostly on my ASP.Net web applications Visual Basic - 6.0 on MSVB6, .Net on Visual Studio (there's a software my companie bought and that was debeloped on 6; I was assigned to mantain and develope it further PHP - DreamWeaver

0
votes

XSLT - XmlSpy, Visual Studio

0
votes

Not exactly freeware, but I'd use whats necessary.

  • C/C++ Win — Visual Studio 2010
  • C/C++/Fortran Linux —Netbeans
  • HTML/CSS — Dreamweaver
  • Perl — Activestate Komodo
  • PHP — Activestate Komodo
  • Python — Activestate Komodo
  • TCL — Activestate Komodo
0
votes

If you're including Vim, then Notepad++. I use it for most languages, including Java (compiled with Ant) and smaller C++ projects (compiled with MinGW), and it seems to be pretty popular in general, especially for web development. It has more/better features than some of the more popular IDE's I've used, even. I do prefer using Visual Studio for C# and XCode for Objective-C, though.

0
votes

Smalltalk - your own image.

So Squeak uses Squeak, Pharo uses Pharo, ...

I think only Gnu Smalltalk doesn't, where I suspect they use Emacs or Vim.

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