I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development for the last 4 years, and before that I used C and C++ using Emacs for 7 years.
I am way more productive in IntelliJ IDEA than I was before. One reason is the instant feedback on syntax errors when I type the code. I don't need to compile to see them, as I used to in C and C++. Another reason is the navigation support you get in an IDE.
The difficulty of writing static analysis software does depend on the language, though. In Visual Studio, for example, intellisense and autocompletion are vastly superior in C# compared to C++.
As a matter of interest, which C IDEs are you referring to? I'd like to check them out.
VS2012 is actually the IDE I was thinking of when I said VS C++ support is inferior to C#'s. While there is intellisense, it does not display any documentation. The closest thing it offers is variable names for a method's arguments.
In fact Eclipse features a special compiler that builds your code immediately and also allows IDE to highlight your errors better than any static analysis would. So actually it kind of does. Assuming compiler IS the language.
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development for the last 4 years, and before that I used C and C++ using Emacs for 7 years.
I am way more productive in IntelliJ IDEA than I was before. One reason is the instant feedback on syntax errors when I type the code. I don't need to compile to see them, as I used to in C and C++. Another reason is the navigation support you get in an IDE.
I've written more about the differences in development environment here: http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/17/programmer-productivity-em...