Presenting Mathematica (or, rather, FrontEnd?) as IDE is harmful for its reputation among hackers:
1) Workflow differs from one in traditional IDEs, and lots of build tools are simply not there
2) It has different goals, being a bottom-up environment: users start with tiny one-cell programs; IDEs like Eclipse suggest to “create a new project” by default
It's a tool for discovery and improvisation, not for building large programs, with multi-modular source code provided by different independent authors, that is sometimes (often?) written in different languages.
“Improvisations and Experiment Environment” or something like that would be a more adequate description.
It's not that FrontEnd can't be an IDE too. I believe it can be a better IDE than anything else out there but experienced programmers disagree unanimously. Part of it is personal tastes, part is mind being closed by means of classical IDE heritage, part is not-so-rational disgust towards proprietary software, paid software, S.W., etc.
FrontEnd and the language itself encourage users to add features themselves. Those who persist probably end up with the highly personalised product the majority of them could never buy. (+) Still, some features would be universally needed, so one might want to install a package from a public hub, but FrontEnd lacks this feature. (–)
I think hackers would appreciate it more if Mathematica (FrontEnd?) were marketed as emacs-like tool. Still, without a proper package manager (and an open package server, or at least an open standard for package server) it would be a hopeless take. — Though I heard something like package manager is coming. :-)
