Dogfooding, is the practice of using one’s own products or services.
This can be applied quite obviously to text editors and IDEs1. In fact, I think they are one of the most common-sense applications of it, in addition to being a case of bootstrapping:
The editor must be good enough to implement itself.
This can be extended to help make a further point later:
The editor must be good for writing code in the language it is implemented in.
Vim
Bram Moolenaar obviously uses Vim to work on Vim, as I’m sure do most people who contribute to its ecosystem:
I have to admit I don’t use many plugins, other than what is included with the distribution (such as matchit and termdebug). When I need something I tend to either make a quick hack or add it to the Vim base. That’s the luxury of being the creator :-).
Bram, in an interview.
JetBrains
By contrast, all of the JetBrains IDEs are written in Java (or at least run on the JVM), and yet some of them aren’t Java IDEs! This makes dogfooding impossible, since you can’t use a Python or C++ editor to write a Java program. I don’t mean to pick on JetBrains specifically, but it brings me to an important rule of thumb:
The best editor for a serious language was probably written in that language.
Now does this imply that very high-level scripting2 languages
like Python and Haskell aren’t “serious” since you couldn’t write an
editor to beat Emacs in them?
Yes.