1. It was first to be that good. Simply erring on the side of maturity.
2. The developers of IntelliJ appear to be tireless advocates of refactoring and clean code, everything in the tool reflects this.
3. I can also develop in the same IDE, or similar IDEs/tools from JetBrains, in the following technologies: Ruby, Rails, Java, Spring, JS, HTML, Scala, C#, Groovy ..
4. The tool comes bundled with a really nice UML tool that is growing in ability for the Flash platform.
5. They busily fix stuff all the time. It’s as much a testament to their dedication as it is their own code’s refactorability.

Mostly it’s not about the features directly, the features are driven by the underlying ethos, and this is what matters to me.

This is not to say that FDT is not a great tool. I don’t stay abreast of it’s releases, so I can’t properly comment, and it may in fact be better. With IntelliJ I am comfortable and rarely stifled, so I move on to other things (like code and long comments on blog posts).

I’d also be interested as to how it compares against FlashBuilder for Flex development… but first things first – #9 anyone?

I just don’t want thought leaders to omit clarifications of their “pragmatism”. I really think we’re quite pragmatic in our shop, we did not race out and change everything at once, for example, as we adopted agile.

I don’t think you can easily bring agile to anything, it’s such an absurdly different beast. And it’s no silver bullet either, however when stacked up with waterfall, it often feels like it.

Nonetheless, I want to see the entire community, especially the thought leaders, pushing for better practices all the time. Jesse Freeman did this commendably with his underlying theme to the AR talk, and even he seems to look upon the ivory-tower types as a bit hi-fallutin.. I think we’re all the same people.

Fact is, my idea of a good presentation of Robotlegs pre-fatc would have been an utter dissapointment to any attendee. Your’s was accessible, and nothing you said was invalid, despite what I said about it. You clearly have to lead by example, and those examples have to be accessible. Your presentation was very entertaining and very accessible despite the BPM :)

I’ve decided that when I next present on Robotlegs I won’t discuss the framework at all, just show some examples of really hard “fixes” (Winston Wolf styles) and how well crafted code makes them easy enough to fix for the Vincent Vegas of this world.

@producerism Thanks chief, fixed.