91–100 of 152 posts
Visual Studio does everything within the same window (source code management, code review, diffs). Yes, it's great. It does not need any 'new' paradigm, that's the standard operating modus. It's a good thing this ideology of tools that simplify the process is spreading. But it's not novel. This article sounds like the author never used Visual Studio.
If you walked into an office and saw them using 1984 equipment — fax machines, landlines and Rolodexes — you'd think the company is hopelessly behind times. Jane Street is a cutting-edge technology corporation, but their internal tools use 80*25 text-mode UIs just like the ones you'd find on a 1984 IBM PC/AT. It's not the company's fault: we developers are stuck in the tar pit of an unfortunate local maximum with all…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, my comment was a bit mean/dismissive. People do have to stop chasing the trends, cause that's a full time job. And it's easy to not notice productivity gains you've missed for years. In my opinion Emacs/Vim: - except for some specific roles: Emacs -> Lisp development, Vim -> to be honest, not sure what to say, what is Vim's strong suit? except for core editing commands - and unless you put in a ton of hours int…
Emacs user here. I have used lot's of IDE's in the past until I decided to take Emacs seriously. The problem with IDE's is that you have to learn one for each language. Working on multi-language projects becomes really annoying. With Emacs I can remain in the same place. If I spend a little bit configuring it I get most of the IDE features. I am always at home. Git is there too. Now I even check my email there, great…
However, I have to point something out which proved to be an eye-opener for some people I've discussed the second point you bring up:
> But it is a free software program that has been around like 30 years. I am confident it is a tool I can invest in and it won't let me down. I can not say the same about proprietary IDE's and editors.
This argument is a bit dated, I think it harks back to the days of Borland IDEs and the Halloween Papers for Microsoft.
Why do I think it's a bit dated:
1. Quite a few of the commercial IDEs are not fully proprietary anymore, for example the core of the Jetbrains IDEs is Open Source; Visual Studio is proprietary but large parts of what it offered have been split into external components which are Open Source, more precisely Roslyn; I'll grant you XCode, but at that point you know you're locking yourself into the proprietary Apple ecosystem anyway; the other major IDEs are actually fully Open Source: Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio Code, Atom
2. The Cathedral and the Bazaar predictions kind of failed ... Open Source didn't take over the world; it carved a segment in the market, a huge one, but still, a segment; proprietary software adjusted and now both coexist in various combinations in between Free Software and fully proprietary software. Both FOSS and commercial projects and products have to please their "clients". They do that, or they die. So the commercial side is in my opinion a lot more flexible than it used to be.
3. The software market is way more mature than it was when the GNU propaganda machine and later the Eric Raymond Open Source-hype machine were fully operational (with IBM backing it) - I'm only half joking about the FSF/Open Source propaganda, we have to acknowledge it for what it was and we aware of it , even if we consider its goals as noble; anyway, just because software vendors were dying like flies back in the 80's and 90's, it doesn't mean that mature software companies today will suffer the same fate. They might be somewhat fickle, and yes, even big companies can go bankrupt, but let's not discuss hypotheticals, let's discuss based on actual data:
* Visual Studio was launched in 1997, 21 (!) years ago; Visual Basic was launched in 1991, 27 (!) years ago; I know that Visual Basic didn't transition cleanly to Visual Studio, my point is that many principles from the Visual Basic IDE applied to Visual Studio
* Netbeans was launched in 1996, 22 years ago
* IntelliJ IDEA was launched in 2001, 17 years ago
* Eclipse was launched in 2001
My point is that was impressive to say "Emacs was launched 20 years ago" back in 1999, when the oldest mainstream IDE was 7-8 years old and you had common failures of companies selling IDEs (therefore losing support). However in 2018, as I said, this is a bit dated.
Many a Visual Studio developer have fed their family by using this tool from Microsoft over more than 2 decades. Same for Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ. I suspect Visual Studio Code and maybe even Atom will follow this trajectory.
So let's stop this FUD, please. Looking at my arguments, I think you can agree with me that based on the data we have, a Visual Studio developer can probably retire successfully in 2040 while still using Visual Studio. And Visual Studio is "risky" because it's majority proprietary. But Eclipse, for example, is fully Open Source, backed by an organization, etc.
Visual Studio does everything within the same window (source code management, code review, diffs). Yes, it's great. It does not need any 'new' paradigm, that's the standard operating modus. It's a good thing this ideology of tools that simplify the process is spreading. But it's not novel. This article sounds like the author never used Visual Studio.
You'd be surprised. Our domain has so much snobbery and elitism that it's entirely possible that a developer tried 1 (one) IDE, maybe decades ago, didn't configure it at all (or couldn't, at the time) and decided for all eternity that IDEs are bad. It's quite funny sometimes when you show someone modern functionality in a modern IDE and they have to accept that the people making IDEs are, basically, not all morons (w…
I'm a career-long .NET dev and I've wanted to step away and begin learning C++ on a non-Windows platform with VIM and my only attempts were met with so much frustration that I gave up. To be clear, I believe in the power of VIM, I just never got acclimated to it.
Maybe this year is the year I stop making excuses and just learn.
P.S. I see lots of arguments elsewhere about whether VIM is an IDE. Either way I think your first point stands in my case @oblio.
If you walked into an office and saw them using 1984 equipment — fax machines, landlines and Rolodexes — you'd think the company is hopelessly behind times. Jane Street is a cutting-edge technology corporation, but their internal tools use 80*25 text-mode UIs just like the ones you'd find on a 1984 IBM PC/AT. It's not the company's fault: we developers are stuck in the tar pit of an unfortunate local maximum with all…
> we developers are stuck No, only a subset is "stuck" not using the most fancy and shiniest. Janestreet seems to be interested in this particular subset. Maybe they found a correlation between robustness and efficiency, and not fooling around with tooling for the sake of optics too much. After all, finding correlations is what they do. If you want to argue "behind times," argue inefficiency, but I think you will com…
Wow, that's aggressive. Such a policy would "weed out" people like Alan Kay or Bret Victor over a trivial difference in opinion about UI efficiency.
Are you sure creating a monoculture of thought around this single issue makes sense for a company?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised. Our domain has so much snobbery and elitism that it's entirely possible that a developer tried 1 (one) IDE, maybe decades ago, didn't configure it at all (or couldn't, at the time) and decided for all eternity that IDEs are bad. It's quite funny sometimes when you show someone modern functionality in a modern IDE and they have to accept that the people making IDEs are, basically, not all morons (w…
This is true for me :( I'm a career-long .NET dev and I've wanted to step away and begin learning C++ on a non-Windows platform with VIM and my only attempts were met with so much frustration that I gave up. To be clear, I believe in the power of VIM, I just never got acclimated to it. Maybe this year is the year I stop making excuses and just learn. P.S. I see lots of arguments elsewhere about whether VIM is an IDE.…
Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio.
Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio Code.
Use dotnet core on Linux, with Visual Studio Code, etc.
Then maybe try dotnet core on Linux, with Vim.
But don't believe the hype. I use Vim as an editor because I do a lot of scripting. I use it even on Windows. But I use it because I'm already used to most of its commands, I have a decent config file for it (somewhat lean, not that many plugins) and for my job I need to know it cause I often interact with various systems which use it.
Despite being a touch typist and knowing most of the commands, I'm still a Vim heathen. That is, I don't use numbered yank buffers, I just use the default one, I also remapped Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v to do visual block operations for when I'm too lazy to come up with fancy selections, etc.
Anyway, my point is, using Vim might not pay off fully. My brain just isn't wired to work in Vim commands. And I know and use w, W, b, B, f, t, folds, blah, blah. I definitely don't use it to "magician" level.
You know what? I think in the end it doesn't matter. The only time Vim's nature actually helps is when I pre-process some sort of text data dumps.
For the other moments I'm thinking way more than I'm writing or editing. So it's not the text editor that's the blocking point.
Damn blocking IO. Getting outputs from the brain is hard and slow!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even without impatience/ignorance/incompetence. It's very hard to follow what everybody's doing. Seriously hard. Everyday people are making stuff, and have been doing so for 50 years. I'm a regular emacs user and I keep being surprised by new modes/extensions that I never heard of, but were released 2 years ago -_-;
True, my comment was a bit mean/dismissive. People do have to stop chasing the trends, cause that's a full time job. And it's easy to not notice productivity gains you've missed for years. In my opinion Emacs/Vim: - except for some specific roles: Emacs -> Lisp development, Vim -> to be honest, not sure what to say, what is Vim's strong suit? except for core editing commands - and unless you put in a ton of hours int…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true for me :( I'm a career-long .NET dev and I've wanted to step away and begin learning C++ on a non-Windows platform with VIM and my only attempts were met with so much frustration that I gave up. To be clear, I believe in the power of VIM, I just never got acclimated to it. Maybe this year is the year I stop making excuses and just learn. P.S. I see lots of arguments elsewhere about whether VIM is an IDE.…
Do it one step at a time. Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio. Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio Code. Use dotnet core on Linux, with Visual Studio Code, etc. Then maybe try dotnet core on Linux, with Vim. But don't believe the hype. I use Vim as an editor because I do a lot of scripting. I use it even on Windows. But I use it because I'm already used to most of its commands, I have a decent c…
Thank you for the advice!
I tend to want to learn how things "on the other side of the tracks" work mostly because I get tired of the heated debates around tooling and I'm determined to learn as much as I can so that I can be well-rounded (that and C++ has been the beast I never finished taming).
Do you have any recommendations for a distro of Linux that would be easy to switch to? Go gentle on me, I'm a Wandows kid by day!
EDIT: Seems I can't reply to you anymore. Thanks again for your recommendations. I think a VM is a good route too. I'm not too concerned with purity at this point as much as learning. I can find beauty in most systems regardless of ideology :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised. Our domain has so much snobbery and elitism that it's entirely possible that a developer tried 1 (one) IDE, maybe decades ago, didn't configure it at all (or couldn't, at the time) and decided for all eternity that IDEs are bad. It's quite funny sometimes when you show someone modern functionality in a modern IDE and they have to accept that the people making IDEs are, basically, not all morons (w…
I recently switched over to Visual Studio Code and even though I previously had a bit experience with it, switching over was frustrating. It takes time to change your work flow, to set up the IDE as needed, to get plugins and what not fine-tuned. Now I can't imagine working without Visual Studio Code because all those seemingly little features add up and what do you mean I can seamlessly use Git to manage my code or…
It lets you view a pull request's changes right there in a standard IDE window, so that you can get full code navigation features during code review, including stuff like peeking the docstring or implementation of any functions the code references. Or, if you notice something amiss while reviewing your changes before submitting a pull request, you can just make the change, re-run tests, and commit, without ever leaving the diff viewer. Or being able to just toggle gitblame annotations on and off right there in the editor.
It's nothing worth switching platforms or programming languages over, but, since switching away from .NET and seeing the gulf between the level of seamlessness you get out of Visual Studio and what's available in other IDEs, I can now see why they've come to have such a poor reputation. Visual Studio isn't exactly lightweight, but it manages to pack in enough cool tricks to justify itself.
(Until you install ReSharper. Then it becomes as memory-hungry and unstable as everyone else.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do it one step at a time. Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio. Use dotnet core on Windows, with Visual Studio Code. Use dotnet core on Linux, with Visual Studio Code, etc. Then maybe try dotnet core on Linux, with Vim. But don't believe the hype. I use Vim as an editor because I do a lot of scripting. I use it even on Windows. But I use it because I'm already used to most of its commands, I have a decent c…
I see, I see. Thank you for the advice! I tend to want to learn how things "on the other side of the tracks" work mostly because I get tired of the heated debates around tooling and I'm determined to learn as much as I can so that I can be well-rounded (that and C++ has been the beast I never finished taming). Do you have any recommendations for a distro of Linux that would be easy to switch to? Go gentle on me, I'm…
Unixen are generally the same, but you won't figure that out at first, so you do want something a bit friendlier.
My personal opinion would be to go with the mainstream distributions, since you want support from fellow humans on chat, forums, etc. I'm more of an Ubuntu guy, but people seem to like and use Mint or Debian or Fedora.
Don't fall into an Arch or Slackware trap early on, I don't really see the benefit of going for "purity" at this stage. There's this curve, I find, where you first go for newbie friendly, then you go for hardcore, and then you find a balance. The mainstream distros can be user friendly and are balanced. If you want to learn a lot, IMO go all in and either go Linux From Scratch (LFS) one time, or Gentoo for a while. But since you're a professional, after getting a hang of things with some deep learning (see LFS or Gentoo), you probably want to stay close to corporate environments. Those generally are Red Hat/Cent OS (so Fedora is somewhat close) or Ubuntu/Debian (Mint is also close).
TL;DR: Make an Ubuntu VM, start using it full-screened as much as possible instead of your Windows host. See how far that takes you. Good luck and have fun! :)