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Hello guys, I've recently came across different points of view concerning IDEs: there are people who find that they are bad or at least unnecessary, and there are people who find that they are good or even indispensable. The only two arguments I found favorable to IDEs say that IDEs help people code faster and, in some cases, they are indispensable tools because you can't properly program without it in some languages, like Java. But then I found some people arguing that if a language needs an IDE to be used this is a sign that this language is a bad programming language in the first place. According to these people, a good programming language shouldn't require an IDE to be used efficiently. People complain that IDEs are bloatwares, resource consuming, and they get worse in every release. When working with projects, IDEs tend to add a bunch of useless information, hidden files and metadata. IDEs has their own work flow and particular ways of doing things, there is no space for creativity and over time you become passively tied to what these softwares offer you. I found a lot of people saying that they prefer to stick with lightweight and versatile text editors, like VIM, EMACS, Sublime etc, and the basic tool chain, so they know exactly what they are doing, they have more control over what's happening and there is more flexibility the way things can be done. VIM and EMACS are not considered IDEs in a pejorative way, although they can have IDE features, because they don't have the bad qualities of monolithic bloatwares like Eclipse and Visual Studio, and they don't force you to develop bad habits, hence they are primarily considered lightweight text editors. Here are some articles I've been reading recently: http://java.dzone.com/articles/ide-bad-programming-language http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/ide-culture-vs-unix-philosophy/ http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/ What's your opinion about that? What do you thing about the use of IDEs?

What is the best and easiest way to debug PHP code at run-time (step-over) with breakpoints. So that I can view the values on run-time and can debug easily. So, I want to know which php server and IDE works well with XDebug and easiest to configure with those. To be honest, I have tried 3-4 times in my life in last 7-8 years staring from win XP to Win 7 to setup xdebug with an IDE and a server and have failed, now again I need it in Win 8. I believe I can do it this time with your help. I just want any IDE with any server to work with xdebug in Win 8, so that I can pause execution at a break-point and see values of the variables. I do not even want to change values at run-time, just need to see those.