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Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
301–310 of 652 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#302This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. I asked him how he managed to code, and he replied with something that stayed with me: a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place. The organization should be so intuitive that anyone could build a mental model of the structure and navigate it easily, even without seeing it. It felt…
some colleague some time ago argued that one can write code without much/any spaces, because, "you can see, it's colored differently".. sounding like, "i am breathing". All these IDE+- things may be nice-to-have but most soon become crutches, and then you cannot live without them, and only walk their walk, not yours. Just turning off syntax coloring freaks recent developers.. even quite good ones.. i observed it. The…
> "All these IDE+- things may be nice-to-have but most soon become crutches, and then you cannot live without them, and only walk their walk, not yours."
... and?
Cars have automatic chokes, power assisted steering, hydraulic brakes, airbags, seatbelts, auto-dimming mirrors, self-running wipers, and it's fine. People argue that driving a stick-shift is more authentic but even they use syncromesh and clutches, they don't complain about how rubber tyres are for wimps and they use cartwheel-style metal bands wrapped around wood. They don't complain about having a differential instead of fixed drive to the axel.
A plain editor relies on terminals displaying multiple lines and updating them, filesystems for storage, an OS, a keyboard, ASCII or equivalent, maybe virtual memory management and TUIs and "then you can't live without them"! (scream emoji). But so what, it's not a problem, nobody seriously programs on punched cards because they don't want to become dependent on screens and keyboards.
You can make a case that artisan craftsman furniture is better quality than Ikea furniture but that's not because the artisan avoids factory machinery and uses hand tools, it's that the artisan spends more time and effort and takes longer (and needs to charge a lot more money). If you want to make the case that the artisan shouldn't use tape-measures, laser levels, power sanders, power saws, dust masks, wood glue, clamps, they should use a pencil behind the ear, a thumb's width and a handsaw because that's how they learn the True Nature of Wood(tm) then maybe you're just posturing and gatekeeping, or have some sort of Amish-style religion.
Calling power tools 'crutches' is so you can imply that people who use them have disabled themselves. Instead it's like saying people who commute 20 miles to work in a car are using the car as a crutch because you can just walk 5 hours each way and that's more real. It's embarassing that people are so desperately trying to claim both "I don't use power tools because power tools are for weak babies and I'm a STRONG MAN" and in the same breath "my editor can do everything an IDE can do, it isn't inferior, it is a power tool!".
> "Just turning off syntax coloring freaks recent developers.. even quite good ones.."
Just turning off thermometer and oven temperature controls freaks recent cooks ... even quite good ones. Are you going to make the case that restaurants would be better if all cooks worked like your grandma with a log fire who had learned the right feel of heat for bread, cake, or roasts? No? Because that's obviously silly? But what if those developers one day in 2025 find themselves on a monochrome screen, with no shades of gray and no underlines or italics and no option to buy an alternative, hah what then?! Isn't that obviously also silly? NB. you didn't remove paragraphs or punctuation or capital letters from your comment, maybe you're just not a good writer and need these assistive crutches?
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#303This question reminds me of the first time I met a blind programmer. I asked him how he managed to code, and he replied with something that stayed with me: a good programmer should organize software in such a way that every piece of code has a clear and logical place. The organization should be so intuitive that anyone could build a mental model of the structure and navigate it easily, even without seeing it. It felt…
This is one of the features I like most about F#, after some years experience with it. The project is structured with a specific file ordering, and there's no forward referencing. Similar within a file/module as well, most of the time.
So to understand a project, you start at the top and work your way down, you wont encounter anything you haven't come across yet as you go.
Ironically, this 'feature' so annoyed me when I first came across the language in 2015 or so, that I put it down after five minutes and forgot about it for years.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it though? It reads to me more like elitism to me. A better summary is: “people have different workflows because different people like to approach problems differently.” That’s all it is. I find LSPs largely get in my way. I don’t have them disabled because 1% of the time I do find them useful. But for the other 99% of the time they’re adding no value at all. So I could very easily write code without an LSP (and o…
> people have different workflows because different people like to approach problems differently. But the way you like to approach problems is heavily influenced by your history of solving them, what tools were available at the time, what you chose to adopt, and how often you revise that toolset. It's not elitist to say that people tend to use what they've always used, which was my point: "how do people cope without…
I’ve spent lots of time working in IDEs and lots of time working without them.
Generally I find IDEs more useful when I’m working with an unfamiliar code base or an unfamiliar language.
And that’s probably why there appears to be an age gap. It might be more down to comfort with the code rather than comfort with the tooling.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the call stack will helpfully point out the file and line number of the location the error was thrown from, just a few keystrokes in vim will get you there. Or Cmd+Click/Ctrl+Click in an IDE
Uhhh that would involve a mouse, gross ; )
"Uhhh that would involve a precision action with a tool specifically designed for precision actions" ;)
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree on turning it off to find out. I disagree with almost all of your takes though. If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month. > 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. I know where they are. I use them every day. But reaching for them to check every argument if…
>If you work without it, I would similarly suggest turning it in for a month. In the past when I've tried to use IDEs, I've often given up within minutes because they would keep doing things that disrupt my flow - like popping up an entire menu of autocomplete suggestions in a way that obscures other code I'm trying to read, or autotyping a close bracket that I would have typed anyway by muscle memory, or not making…
Okay, now stick with it for a month.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#307I started professionally programming using VB back in the 90's, I remember how amazing it was at the time to use an IDE with autocomplete and a visual debugger coming from just doing basic on say the Commodore. I was never a C or assembly programmer, I understood it but everything I wanted to do I could do much faster in a higher level language in an IDE.
This was back when Windows was finally getting good (Win95) and I was not familiar with Unix at all. All of this seemed like the obvious progression from text base UI's to GUI's.
So for me it has been very natural to use autocomplete and expect to just attach a debugger and inspect running code and even modify it (VB allowed edit and continue) which is still a rare thing today that I miss.
Also using a mouse to move around the code base and inspect it just like using a GUI to use the computer. Because of this I have never developed a strong keyboard only ability, I expect a mouse to be available.
I remember getting into web development and having to step backwards into a language that wasn't really typed and no real IDE's that could autocomplete an interactive debugger, back to print debugging and text searching. Eventually the browser developer tools caught up but the JS language was pretty difficult to accurately autocomplete and navigate / refactor properly at a code level with an IDE.
Was fun to watch all the JS devs get excited over Typescript because autocomplete and refactor now worked reliably. For me having a language with real types the IDE can understand was the way it's supposed to be.
It seems like it's how you got started that determines your preference. If you were a Unix guy you liked the command line and TUI's and everything was about wrangling things at a text level, everything is a file and just a stream of bytes. If you were a Windows or Mac person then it was GUI's and mouse interaction and it was more about widgets and objects and IDE's.
I can appreciate both sides, I would like to be stronger in the command line and keyboard but how I got started strong influences the tooling I prefer and I am sort of set in my ways now, I suspect that is pretty typical.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Autocomplete is more for discoverability than saving on typed characters, letting you rely less on documentation and more on the actual interface you're interacting with
That's exactly the problem: You don't know the code. You're relying on autocomplete to tell you what the signature of the function you're looking for is. I rely less on documentation because I've got it all memorized due to not relying on autocomplete.
Surely you didn't memorize the entire 3rd party ecosystem of a programming language?
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
untyped languages (Python, Ruby) 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.
I'm not confusing anything. It's relatively common to call the use of dynamically typed languages without static type hints "untyped". I'm pretty sure you knew what I meant and are just trying the classic "you used this word in a way I don't agree with therefore you're wrong".
Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?
#310I have a friend who still to the day doesn’t use syntax highlighting. People like living on hard mode lol