And what do you attribute that environment's productivity to?
Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
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Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#2For c# visual studio .NET in 2012 (I really haven't used it since) with its refactoring tools was pretty quick and its compilation system with integrated error checking in the text editor. It was really productive.
When I switched over to JavaScript I miss that a lot. Of course JavaScript just doesn't lean itself that well to automatic refactoring and the build process is significantly more complex too, so you only get local syntax checking usually in the editor.
And then eventually VS.NET got auto-help where it would should you documentation in a side window if you typed in a function or hovered over one. That was nice when using APIs you were not familiar with.
You could actually find all references/usages and be sure it was actually correct. I could click on an include and it would actually open the file no matter what and if it was referencing a DLL/Assembly it would immediate give me a decompile/documentation link.
The downside of the visual studio approach was the lack of text-based configuration. I spend hours adjusting settings in project files. (This was addressed via CMake when dealing with C++ but I do not think there was an equivalent for C# that I was aware of that the time.)
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#3Unity3d: you can run a game in it and adjust everything live, including scripts. Also I've yet to see a UI framework as flexible as UGUI that is based on Unity's ECS architecture.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#4Terminal + vim + window manager that supports multiple workspaces.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#5For me it's either been emacs with a lisp (SBCL or Clojure), or C# with Visual Studio. In both cases the reasons were similar -- deep editor integration with the language. Having an editor that understands how the language works and is structured makes refactoring and navigation much simpler, and makes it faster for me to author code.
That being said, most of the major editors are pretty great today. There's great support for all the top 10 languages in multiple editors, so if you want to write Go in VS Code, or Elixir in Atom, or Python in vim, you're probably going to have a good time (or at least the editor will do quite a lot for you). It's a great time to be a software developer!
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#6Visual Lisp: Elegant and simple language, great graphical debugger with stepper (as in Visual Basic), great compiler, safe.
No other Lisp or other IDE's come close, but I never worked on a lisp machine, which should have about the same features. I never warmed up to Smalltalk enough to use it productively.
Visual Basic had a macro recorder feature (my lisp didn't have this, only emacs) and a similarily great IDE, but their language ecosystem is just horrible. You can easily write a fast and safe multithreaded server, but using their libraries just sucks. .NET got that better, but still not comparable.
PHP Komodo was great, but still. It was PHP. Horrible libraries.
Emacs+magit+c-mode+flycheck... or Visual C++ for my usual work is fine, but also very limited compared to better integrated systems. Haven't setup LSP yet though. This should improve things by a wide margin.
I also had a nice MultiEdit Pro integration with all my tools and docs, which was better than my current Emacs setup. But that was decades ago, on DOS.
Graphical development env's like Matlab Controldesk Simulink was nice, but not really productive. You constantly click in and out of nested blocks, connect dots and follow long lines, which is similar to counting parens manually with lisp. It sucks.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#7For me it's either been emacs with a lisp (SBCL or Clojure), or C# with Visual Studio. In both cases the reasons were similar -- deep editor integration with the language. Having an editor that understands how the language works and is structured makes refactoring and navigation much simpler, and makes it faster for me to author code. That being said, most of the major editors are pretty great today. There's great su…
Something that makes a big difference to me with Emacs and a Lisp relative to other languages and editors is that everything works by communicating to a running process.
Need to look up function args or a docstring? It doesn't have a separate thing that statically analyzes the code. It asks the running process. Want to see what an updated function outputs? It can use the state of the running process. Trying out some other change? It doesn't have to reload anything, lose or persist state, etc... it just updates the running process and you go from there. Want that running process to be on a remote server? An Android device? A page running in a web browser? Your powerful desktop while you work from a small laptop while lying in your hammock? No problem.
I don't understand why this hasn't caught on to the same degree with other languages. Most of them have REPLs and introspection tools, so they could behave this way.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#8Visual FoxPro. By a long mile.
I never need to install a package system, use VM, install a database engine or anything like that.
Maybe the most was download some components from some site (I remenber was a large forum back them).
Integrate REPL, form builder, report builder, rdbms, database builder, query builder, menu builder...
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Second best was Delphi 3/7.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#9Unix Systems. Linux, BSDs, Sun/Solaris
Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?
#10Vim + tmux + NERDTree + a bunch of other plugins to handle code completion, gutters, etc.
Add a 34-inch ultrawide monitor (Dell has been best with color accuracy for me) to the mix and a nice keyboard, makes all the difference in the world!