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Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

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Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#511

Post by teddyh »

pjc50 wrote: post #467
zahlman wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMX, people who use the term "untyped language" generally: a) use languages with Hindley-Milner inference; b) don't consider things that can "only the program can see at runtime" to qualify as "types".

If your language lets you add a number to a string or divide a dictionary by a boolean, that's .. exciting, but also the sort of thing that produces https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

Those “Wat”s are mostly the result ot weak typing, (as opposed to strong typing) which is an entirely orthogonal concept to static/dynamic typing. Don’t confuse the two concepts. Older languages which first started to experiment with dynamic typing also tended to use weak typing. But as things progressed, weak typing was considered less good in serious languages, while it was still expected in “scripting” languages, and Javascript was designed with that principle. Nowadays we have more or less decided that weak typing is almost always a bad idea, and Python is an example of a modern dynamically typed, and also strongly typed, language.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#512

Post by ccanning »

Bad coders are bad coders. It has nothing to do with an IDE or features that streamline the process. Code Organization takes a higher-level of intelligence or skill that most people rarely develop without a solid mentor. If you have an organization with poor developers, then you’re not stepping up and using code reviews to mentor or taking time out of your day to educate. Most likely, your code is also not that well-written either or they would learn from that.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#513

Post by teddyh »

emj wrote: post #284
pjc50 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For my personal side project hobby work it's all in one file. Ok, so this is work, but: find . -name '*.cs' -type f -print0 | wc --files0-from=- 1035617 3438912 47446211 total Not many editors are comfortable with a million line document that's 47MB. And that doesn't include generated code (which I very rarely need to look at, but is right there under F12 if I do)

A 100G file was ok in those editors even with syntax highlighting. That is an extreme because saving did take some time but there are ways to optimize for that would it ever become popular. IMHO 640K per file is enough for everybody. dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=100k| tr -dc 'A-Za-z0-9\n' | fold -w 130 > largefile.c

For Emacs, there’s a package for editing very large files: http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/vlf.html>

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#514

Post by ozim »

nimih wrote: post #508
ozim wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are lucky to have small code base or one that you write mostly? With 6 other devs on the team and 5 apps our team supports there is no way I get code well organized especially when as a senior I have devops stuff to deal with meetings, explaining features to business, checking up support tickets and random stuff happening all the time. I don’t know the code base and there is no way to keep up. While I have to div…

I'm curious what you do when you encounter issues in a 3rd party dependency, or (since it sounds like you do dev-ops work) in an infrastructure process or tool whose code you didn't write? I use auto-complete and LSP features pretty heavily myself in my day-to-day development work, but when debugging an issue, I sometimes run into issues with a 3rd party library, or a kubernetes component, or whatever, and it's neces…

Well yes I still do lots of grepping and just search in all files if needed. It is not exclusive but if I can use good IDE features it helps to be quicker.

I also have notes I write down where search is must have as my notes are not structured anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#515

Post by Kapura »

I did a lot of work in unassisted vim when I was in university, and I would say the answer is twofold:

- you become a proficient user of tabs in whatever IDE or text editor or window manager you use. you open up header files (or collapsed source files, depending on the language/IDE) and reference the API you use.

- you get better at naming things. You don't need to guess the name of any specific API, because it makes sense within the context of your codebase. I believe this makes you a better programmer.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#516

Post by teddyh »

motorest wrote: post #103
liontwist wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this comment written by a bot? The concluding paragraph style and general length suggest to me it was.

It wasn't, and if it did I would wager it would write it more elegantly and coherently than me. That goes to show how much I use Claude/Copilot/ChatGPT at my job.

Maybe you should read less AI-authored texts; you’re evidently starting to copy its style.

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#517

Post by agumonkey »

I mostly need LSP on system with tons of ad-hoc definitions. react/typescript is one example, there's so much type definitions that browsing would take eternity. for non framework python codebase, the shell completion will be enough most of the time

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#518

Post by aidos »

jedberg wrote: post #452

This post just gave me an epiphany. I work with some programmers in their 20s. They are some of the best programmers I've ever met. But they never seem to enter "flow state". In fact, they welcome distractions. And now I think I know why. When I was coming up, you needed to enter flow state to be a good programmer. Because you had to keep track of all the functions and their signatures, all the different flows and ob…

You don’t need to ditch vim to have these features! Mostly they’re using lsp in a client (editor) / server relationship. You can run the same tooling happily from vim (I use neovim, but I believe it’s all implemented in vim too).

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#519

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #241
thwarted wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My great-grandmother never used a mixer when making cakes or bread, long after mixers were available, and she was able to pump out treats and full meals without batting an eye, the best anyone ever had. I don't have a problem with my "productivity", whatever that means. I'm not trying to write code faster, my own experience is that writing code faster leads to shitter code. I'm not hindered by my tools, and most of m…

I didn't setup the tool to write code "faster". I setup the tool mostly to reduce RSI because I wouldn't need to use the mouse as browsing docs with vim only uses the keyboard. I do agree that you can't write code "faster"; whatever that means but that was never my purpose. You should give these tools a try. From my perspective it's like someone sitting on a small wooden chair and you are proposing an Aeron. Yes, the…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?

#520

Post by efxhoy »

My preferred way of working is plain sublime text and the terminal. I use command line tools for linting, formatting and type checking, wrapped in “make lint”.

I find that sublime is just smart enough to go to the definition using only its “dumb” grepping based approach.

I think the hurdles of getting a nice LSP setup that works across projects in different languages and in a polyglot monorepo is a real determinant. I just really dislike spending any time configuring my editor past the basics, because I’m lazy, updates break them, I move between machines, etc. Getting comfortable with just the basic features means I have less pain maintaining my editor. It’s not a great excuse but for me it’s the path of least resistance.

I frequently pair with colleagues, some are vscode users that are heavy on LSPs and copilot. I have one greybeard colleague who runs a very sophisticated neovim setup, and spends a lot of time maintaining it. We’re all roughly equally productive at the “writing code” part of the job. What sets us apart is our skill in actual software development, which I find is completely uncorrelated to the editor setup. We all work in the tools that are most comfortable to ourselves.

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