It depends on a number of factors including yourself. I am a very visual person. I consider visual design as the native language of expression and representation (at least from a human stand point) for objects that have visual end presentation. I know I am productive this way. Your mileage may wary on how you prefer to think.
It also depends on how good the tool chain is designed. Delphi, Visual Studio.NET, Dreamweaver for example are a sheer pleasure for me to design interfaces with. In my Delphi days, I used to feel that thhe IDE was critical to my productivity. But the old VB6 and FrontPage and even recent Java IDEs get in my way often. I tend to think most people find seamless integration more productive. If you are an outlier, good for you. As for simple language IDEs, some languages benefit more than others. Even though I like more integrated solutions like PyDev, SPE etc and have a long history of IDE usage, I keep coming back to SciTE when it comes to Python. But I would not dream using Java/C# without an IDE. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list