211–220 of 652 posts
Some embedded ish IDEs, ssh-ing to a remote machine where you only have text mode etc.
You'd better keep that part of your brain that can code without autocomplete in shape, you never know when you may need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course I agree that code should be organized logically, but I wonder if you could expand on what you mean. Do you drill down into finer and finer directories of detail, code units, classes and functions? I work with someone that navigates the tree structure of all our directories every time they need to look for something. It is painfully slow to watch and if you ask me, they produce fairly spaghetti architecture.…
> Of course I agree that code should be organized logically, but I wonder if you could expand on what you mean. Do you drill down into finer and finer directories of detail, code units, classes and functions? from the parent (i am not the parent) > I try to follow the logic and structure of the project in a way that feels natural and easy to follow later. in my own experience it applies to everything in a codebase. w…
When reviewing code, the reviewer responsability is not only to make sure that it works, otherwise tests and its coverage would be enough, but they aren't.
If a reviewer sees that something does not fit with the convention that the team agreed, it should be questioned and also teached or discussed (if some new addition force the team to do so).
You don't need to know all the code base by heart, but how to follow it and place it.
Something like, does your team uses DDD? Where code that interacts with database should be? And how? How your templates are done? Do you use presenters? When? How? Any other patterns?
You should try turning off those features yourself for at least a month and see what happens ;) You’ll learn the answers yourself, much better than us trying to explain them. You’ll learn where all the reference docs live for your language, libraries, and frameworks, and along the way you’ll learn more by actually reading the docs. You’ll learn the value of good project organization and file naming, and explicit impo…
I don't need to turn it off to find out - I've worked in enough untyped languages (Python, Ruby) or badly set up ones (C++) where code intelligence tools don't work to know what it's like, and none of your points are true. 1. I know where the reference docs live already. Auto-complete doesn't obviate that need. 2. Again auto-complete doesn't completely obviate the need to navigate by file name/path (though it does re…
Both of those languages are strongly typed.
It seems you're confusing the fact that the type checking happens at runtime (that is to say, that they are dynamically typed) to mean that they're "untyped", but that's just not the case.
If one is confused about the languages one is using at this level, then modern tooling features aren't likely to help much.
Perhaps if you are working on things in a very "scatter gun" way - i.e. you write a function here a function there but never really go deep in a codebase to really grok it then you'll never really get an understanding of it.
In the old days - or when LSP just doesn't work which for me is probably more than 50% of the time it seems - I rely/relied on compiler errors and/or test failures to detect problems. You can just open up the file that contains the function you are calling etc to go read what it expects.
FWIW I use all the fancy bells and whistles in terms of autocomplete and LSPs when I can (and when it works it is a great help) but I never use AI directly in the code-writing-flow. For me this is akin to the bad old days of junior/offshore Devs just copy-pasting code they found online/on stackoverflow and trying to write glue code to connect it all up. You end up with a real mishmash of inconsistent approaches/styles, duplicated code that does the same thing but in different ways, code that kinda-but-not-quite does what it needs etc, usually no coherent tests, etc etc - tl;dr super low quality and hard to maintain mess.
I will certainly use AI to help me with a few things, perhaps provide an example way of doing something/inspiration, but it is more akin to rubber-ducking and the output of an AI is never directly used. I view it as a quicker way of going to look up the right algorithm in a text book or something.
So, we would use SSH into the VM and do our work. This also involved a lot of debugging of code through vim since it's quicker to make in-place edits and re-run experiments, this taught me a lot on effective debugging and writing code for the VM
So what using an LSP is doing for you heavily depends on the kind of code you write. Are you the kind of dev who works in pretty much a very familiar codebase for a very very long time? Then LSP could even be impeding acquiring a better mental image of your code. Conversely, if you are a coder who often ventures into different and unknown parts then LSP might make you way more productive.
2) Depending on the language, LSP can become an actual part of the language itself. When I code in languages with good LSP (C#, Rust but also C++) I often code with the LSP as my "target".. I think what I'd like to see popping up when I type a "." . In this part of the code I want to see this var and this method.. in that part of the code I want to see also this other vars and methods it gives a very good idea of what the "surface area" of a piece of code looks like.
LSP are also very good instant feedback if something you are typing is wrong. I press "." and nothing shows up? I have some error somewhere and/or the thing I am dotting is not what I think it is.
But, in order for this to work the LSP has to be REALLY good to the point that has to be close to zero doubt that if the LSP is not behaving it means it's your fault. Sadly, not many LSP ever reach this level of reliability.
This is one of the thing that made languages such as C# and Java so popular: the ability to "dot" your way through unfamiliar libraries with great ease without having to dive into documentation to discover there's a function X in some file Y that already does exactly what you are trying to do.
Autocomplete in code is the single most annoying thing I've ever experienced. While I do have a fantastic memory, I don't feel like it makes a huge difference? I don't quite understand the workflow using autocomplete, I suppose. If I'm typing something I know what I'm trying to achieve (with or without a more concrete implementation plan), the general context of the code I'm working with, and it is quicker and far mo…
I'd say it does. Particulary for names based on English words with synonyms, if I recall the wrong synonym for this particular library, at least autocomplete is faster than searching the docs for all the synonyms. But not as fast as scanning the method/function list should the docs have that (and far too many miss it out).
If you can remember which word for the concept the method you're after uses, then you don't need autocomplete.
BTW only Jetbrains (and other heavy Java IDEs?) get autocomplete right IMO. The basic form in VSCode doesn't cut it in my experience, and gets in the way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I work almost exclusively in Emacs without the modern LSP-based tools I'm wondering how many people in the comments would misinterpret it as "Emacs is outdated"/"Emacs does not have modern LSP-based tools"
I was about to switch from Emacs when I found TIDE for Typescript development (which is what I do), and it kept me in Emacs for years longer. Recently though I couldn't resist experimenting with Copilot and I switched to VS code for it, after 32 years. Is there a good Emacs module for it by now?