Do you use the right SharePoint development environment?

Development for SharePoint is very different depending upon whether you are online or using old On-Premises SharePoint.

For SharePoint 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010

1. It's very important to correctly setup a SharePoint environment for development. Correctly configured, this will save you a lot of trouble later on.
2. From time to time, you can seriously damage a SharePoint installation during development and it is best not to install SharePoint on your everyday working machine. Additionally, when you start a new SharePoint project you don't want to carry all the luggage from a previous customization that could potentially affect your new project.
3. Virtual machines can be fired up and shut down easily.
4. Virtual machines can be relocated on a different server and thus it doesn't waste developers' own computer resources.
5. Virtual machines can be copied and brought to a client for demonstration.
6. Very easy for someone to quickly create a new SharePoint server to quickly test or experiment with SharePoint.
7. Bad - There might be more work required to activate additional servers. SharePoint Farms are a lot of work. E.g. Search Server VMs.

For SharePoint Online

Use VSCode – all modern customizations are doing using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx).