81–90 of 652 posts
I’ve been doing this a looooooong time. And that’s really about it. Every time a popup or tooltip covers code around my cursor I groan in agony. I’d probably use it if the tool tips just updated in the bottom right of my screen while I typed or something.
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 use Rust, so explicit imports are required. However, I fail to understand this point > 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. With neovim/LSP, I have a key binding (Kg) that opens a small window within the editor with the rustdocs. Not only this is faster than going to the browser, typing the type…
No one is yucking your yum, it's not an aversion, it's that we don't need them, it never really occurs to us to use them, just like it never occurs to you to not use them. You make it sound like people who don't use them are fumbling and tripping over themselves and aren't actually writing any software.
I don't use any of these out of ignorance first, laziness second, and incompetence third. I didn't know about them, and I had spent a lot of time with the documentation and code of everything I touched (language, dependencies, etc). Looking things up reinforces this. The value of a feature such as autocomplete is marginal to me as a function of the effort I have to make to learn how to use it properly, the frustratio…
I liken it to spaced repetition. The first time I don't know where to find something I grep, after a few times I start to remember. I have a vim layout with 12 windows, so I have many views into the code and always have space to pull up more without losing context. I genuinely feel claustophobic with less.
> What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation
Sometimes I feel "jump to definition" trades immediacy in favor over natural exploration of the surrounding code. I work on a 10 year old mono-repo with 1000s of contributors. After two years I have a good feel for the basic layout, and would say I have a good mental map of the stuff that most affects me. During code review I'm often pointing people to existing implementations that they've just duplicated.
I learned and worked for decades before these tools were available. If they still weren’t available today, you would find that you too could program without them.
Sure, but isn’t this just “why don’t you use the backup camera that all cars have had for a decade or more” / “I learned to drive without one, and you could too”?
The shell is my development environment. I open up new terminals and shells willy nilly. I find cli tools like find/fd/grep/rg are useful because I rarely need to find only the definition of a function, but rather other call sites too, to find out how it is being used. I think being surrounded by the code and being able to slice and dice it leads to a certain kind of familiarity that a tool that takes you right there…
Try working in a really concise language, e.g. an APL-family one, for a bit. Once you get used to it you might take the style back to other languages, it's possible to write fairly concise code in most languages if you actually try. See e.g. https://github.com/tlack/b-decoded/blob/master/b.c
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…