Don't tell that to my Vim- and Sublime-loving coworkers...they'll look at you like you're some idiot who must not be able to program very well.

Yeah, that's a reaction of a lot of people, even when they're going and committing stuff like unused parameters an IDE could have easily caught.

Vim and Sublime have great support for code completion. I've never met someone who writes code completely without any plugins

They do, but code completion is only the tip of the iceberg as far as IDE features go.

Sublime with Anaconda is pretty good..

For Java I'd agree, but for Python I've always preferred a good programmer's editor. I tend to use either Vim or Kate, depending on whether I'm in a CLI or a GUI mood.

IDEs are so bulky and heavyweight, they just feel like they'd get in the way for Python. Especially JetBrains IDEs... they're just so slow and bloated (back when I did Java, I always preferred NetBeans over IntelliJ).

They're not bloated so much as full of useful features.

When I tried to learn Python the first time, it was with vim. I would not recommend that path (VS Code user now).

For me the path has mostly been BlueJ (Java) to Eclipse (Java) to Visual Studio (C#) to Eclipse (Android) to Intellij (Python/Android/JavaScript) to vim (JavaScript/Python).

Some people try to turn vim into an IDE. Personally I like to use a real IDE when I feel like I need it (when I'm working in an unfamiliar codebase or when I need to debug).

I love vim for writing small programs (command line utilities and client side JavaScript) and editing code (such as HTML, CSS, LaTeX). For single page web applications the best IDE for me is the browser in combination with a simple text editor.

I write python professionally and I use vim exclusively, but I have pylint + jedi plugins and could not imagine working without them.

I'm also not convinced that depriving new programmers of real-time syntax checking actually helps them learn. Wouldn't immediate feedback help them memorize the correct syntax?

I learned working with Visual Studio and, yes, I think that helped. Even jsut being able to press "." and see what methods and properties were publicly available on something was helpful