It's certainly an interesting position, from my perspective, as I (and probably OP) have worked our entire professional lives without a syntax checker or any other form of IDE other than simple things like autoindent.

Yes. I too have been pretty anti-IDE most of my history. But I think a lot of it comes down to tools and culture; Ruby (which I have done for the first half of my profesional life) is extremely hard to give good tooling for. So the tools are bad, so they aren't useful. So you don't use them.

Contrast with a language like Java, which is very amenable to a lot of tooling, and kinda sorta needs it to make the language more usable. If that's your background, you can't imagine not having that tooling, because, well, you're used to it.

I will say that I have been playing around with using more IDE-like things, and even though it's culturally pretty foreign to me, I understand the appeal. And as I'm getting more used to it, I get annoyed when it's not there, and then remember how I used to pooh pooh people who required all those fancy features. So... I get it. These days at least.

The gap between classic IDE’s like XCode, Visual Studio or JetBrain’s IDEs and text editors are getting smaller each day.

I’m not keen on the classic IDE experience either. I like VSCode because it’s a simple/light weight text editor which helps me with small tasks like auto-imports.

I feel like these things are especially helpful when you’re a beginner and just started learning a new language.

Anyways, thanks for the hard work Steve and I’ll give it a second try with RA soon!