NYCPHP Meetup

[Rob Marscher]

On May 29, 2012, at 6:33 PM, Ronald Bradford <ronald.bradford at gmail.com> wrote:
> Never used an IDE for PHP, I don't see the purpose, happy for an explanation why I should?

After over 10 years of coding php, I still can't remember the parameter order for a number of basic functions (is this the one where the haystack comes first or the needle?)

So that saves some time.

Autocomplete and context based documentation of your own methods is pretty helpful.

Being able to jump around files in a large project by highlighing a class name and hitting a function key is nice.

Also, the on-the-fly syntax checking can be helpful.

However, the downside is that most of the really useful IDE features use a lot of memory and processing. They basically tokenize and turn your code into a giant database behind the scenes.

So it's helpful to have a lightweight editor handy when you're ready to throw your heavy IDE out the window.