Originally posted by Paul Sturrock:
I'd say it would make them more productive. I once worked for a client who wouldn't stump up for IDE licences (this was pre-Eclipse, and Forte (as was) wasn't really good enough at that stage) - what a nightmare. We also (necessarily) had an architecture which rendered our app-server's hot-deployment useless: so a ten minute stop, build, redeploy and restart stage was introduced for every change we made the effect of every small typo was magnified. So slow and a very frustrating environment to work in. Plus we had no debugger - a tool which can really speed things up.
Which is why when I did consultancy work I used to carry a laptop on which were installed personal licenses of JBuilder, XMLWriter, Delphi, Borland C++, and several other IDEs and other tools.
For longterm jobs I'd install the stuff at the customer location on a machine only I had access to (Borland and now many others allows that).