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Unix as IDE

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Re: Unix as IDE

#131

Post by cjhanks »

ktRolster wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't debug with just print statements, you're doing it wrong :)

"My primary debugging tool is Console.Writeline(). To be honest, I think that's true of a lot of programmers." --Anders Hejlsberg If Anders Hejlsberg does it, there's no shame in it.

Yeah. Sometimes I find it easier to write a program parsing log files with the line number and PID to step through.

Sometimes I think the people who have success with debuggers often must be working on a different class of problems than I am familiar with.

Numerical problems can usually be fixed with a series of targeted asserts and logs.

Re: Unix as IDE

#132

Post by paulfurtado »

mixedCase wrote: post #117
overgard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the "understanding which language you're in" part comes in. ... which standard unix utilities can't do. grep and awk can't reliably determine if a symbol is in a comment, and I can't tell it "rename symbol Foo, but only if it's used as a type identifier in my project". The question isn't if unix could theoretically work as well as an IDE if you added a few thousand custom userland programs that understood la…

> The question isn't if unix could theoretically work as well as an IDE if you added a few thousand custom userland programs that understood language context. The question is if unix, out of the box right now, is competitive with a high end IDE. It's not, because it can't possibly understand your code. You need to download tools for your language just like you downloaded an IDE. The whole point of Unix is that you ha…

Which tools do you know that will handle automatic refactoring in, say, java, from the command line? Genuinely curious, I've wanted something for this

Re: Unix as IDE

#133

Post by gh02t »

exceptione wrote: post #99
__jal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing about text streams that prohibit tools from understanding whatever language you're writing in. Unless you have an very interesting compiler, your IDE is processing text, too. But also, you seem to believe that somehow communication between applications is somehow limited to pipes, which makes the comparison inapt. Ignoring the category error (text format in a data file vs. server application + storag…

I am not the parent you reply to, but see my previous reply for the capabilities you miss in 'dumb' editors. "here is nothing about a text streams that prohibit tools from understanding whatever language you're writing in" Well it might be true that you can deduce the language of some text stream but you need to make a big step in order to interpret it. You are talking about a compiler. Well a compiler takes a compil…

Text editors do have this though, YouCompleteMe for instance does semantic analysis on several languages to generate its completions (using different backends, like Clang or Jedi). Some of the Haskell plugins for Vim and Emacs are also downright amazing with the sort of code analysis and even code derivation they can do right in the editor.

Re: Unix as IDE

#134

Post by chetanahuja »

pavlov wrote: post #65
__jal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that this is a whole lot of cargo cult. Please do explain. Where do I use symbolic representations of technology to attempt doomed magic rituals? As far as the rest of it, everything accumulates cruft. That's why people write new things. And yes, there have been bad decisions. (Just, IMHO, meaningfully fewer than other OSes.) But perhaps I'm blinded by my cargo-cultish ways, can you point to an archa…

symbolic representations of technology to attempt doomed magic rituals I believe that's the official tagline for GNU Autoconf?

Exactly. Sometime in early 1990's, the first configure.ac file was created. Today, every configure.ac file in existence can trace it's ancestry to that original file through a long, unbroken chain of copy-paste operations.

Re: Unix as IDE

#135

Post by emmelaich »

icholy wrote: post #122
snarfy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really needs to be a standard interface that all compiler toolchains can deal with for emitting program structure. All implementations deal with this problem their own way. For C# there is OmniSharp based on NRefactory, and also Microsoft's Roslyn. For C++ there are tools based on libclang. Rust has Racer. It would be nice if there were an interface an editor could implement which gave access to all of these la…

Tada https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol

Wasn't Steven Yegge working on something like this for Google?

A toolchain to handle any/most languages?

Re: Unix as IDE

#136

Post by chetanahuja »

blakeyrat wrote: post #96
haldean wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to hate on something almost universally respected, you're going to have to explain yourself.

Git was made in, what, 2005. We knew about discoverability then. We knew about accessibility then. We knew about user testing, about UX. Git makes use of zero of those concepts. In fact, it seems to be actively hostile towards its users^. We also had source control packages that were not only easier to use, but had more features: TFS let you put a lock on files that don't merge well, for example. Both TFS and Subvers…

The fact that git man page generator is so successful at creating pages full of garbage indistinguishable from the real thing should be a hint

https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

Re: Unix as IDE

#137

Post by unscaled »

mixedCase wrote: post #108
unscaled wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about what UNIX can theoretically do. Yeah, sure, you can refactor a method over a socket, I guess, just as you could use VBA macros in Excel to write a Tetris game using spreadsheet cells as block. The question is whether there is actually good refactoring support on the UNIX command line that can compete directly with the likes of ReSharper or IntelliJ IDEA? I haven't seen anything coming close to that yet…

> The question is whether there is actually good refactoring support on the UNIX command line that can compete directly with the likes of ReSharper or IntelliJ IDEA? I haven't seen anything coming close to that yet. There's nothing stopping people from making it. IDEA Community is open source; I haven't looked at the code but I trust it can be decoupled and made into a separate utility. If you want an example that's…

Then people can just go ahead make it, instead of complaining about lazy developers locking themselves into Jetbrains tools or eclipse or trying to do everything from within Emacs or Vim.

Right now you've got very basic refactoring tools for Go and JRefactor. Maybe a few other tools I don't know.

But in that case I don't see what's the point of running this tool from the CLI instead of configuring VIM/Emacs/{insert your favourite IDE or Editor} to run it on the function under your cursor with just a few keystrokes.

Re: Unix as IDE

#138

Post by superuser2 »

amelius wrote: post #34
the8472 wrote: post #33

It lacks the I in IDE. Those different tools are not integrated. In a java IDE the debugger steps through your source in the same editor view that you just used for editing. You can hover over each identifier while you code or debug to get the docs in a floating panel. Editing incrementally computes compilation errors while you type. Content assist has complete knowledge of the types at your caret position and thus c…

If you can't debug with just print statements, you're doing it wrong :)

This is just like the anti-car people. "People ought to be restricted to slow and unpleasant methods of transportation because they should not want to leave their immediate vicinities."

There's a grain of truth in both cases - there's no energy efficiency like not needing to move around at all, and there's no memory/CPU/cost efficiency like not having sophisticated functionality in the first place.

But once you are used to the functionality that comes from heavyweight tools, "do without - it's better for you" is frustrating at best and more likely engenders hostility for the person saying it.

Re: Unix as IDE

#139

Post by lispm »

catnaroek wrote: post #80
lispm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice rant, but mostly wrong. > Even ignoring the features that make it not so great a high-level language (such as the lack of a workable static semantics, forcing programmers to dynamically test what can be taken for granted in more civilized languages) There are many more high-level features, than static semantics. Lisp is designed for runtime flexibility, not static semantics. Runtime flexibility allows lots of in…

> 10 Mbyte. Today Lisp runs fine on an modern processor and some people tinker with Lisp-based operating systems, again. My main desktop machine has 16 GB RAM, and its processor cycle speed is probably also 1600 times as much as that of a machine from back then. Why can't I get my computer to perform 1600 times as much concurrent work as back then? > Every iPhone does that now, since Apple's Objective-C and the iOS f…

> Why can't I get my computer to perform 1600 times as much concurrent work as back then?

Is that a real question?

> But the amount of work computers do for us hasn't grown proportionally to the amount of computing power.

I don't know about you, but my laptop is much faster than previous machines. Software which used to compile with the Lisp compiler in half an hour, now compiles in a few seconds.

Re: Unix as IDE

#140

Post by barrkel »

paulfurtado wrote: post #132
mixedCase wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question isn't if unix could theoretically work as well as an IDE if you added a few thousand custom userland programs that understood language context. The question is if unix, out of the box right now, is competitive with a high end IDE. It's not, because it can't possibly understand your code. You need to download tools for your language just like you downloaded an IDE. The whole point of Unix is that you ha…

Which tools do you know that will handle automatic refactoring in, say, java, from the command line? Genuinely curious, I've wanted something for this

gofmt is an example of a tool for refactoring on the command line.

There isn't much demand for a similar tool for Java, but I have no doubt that a few months of effort could build one out of Eclipse. Its startup time probably wouldn't be great though. We already have eclim, that treats Eclipse as a daemon serving refactoring APIs to clients, to mitigate the configuration and startup problems.

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