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Putting the I back in IDE

blog.janestreet.com

101–110 of 152 posts

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#101
post #27

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.

Visual Studio without git .. is barely usable. The whole team system integration is a UI disaster, busy, slow and takes gazillion clicks to get anywhere. I like VS as an IDE. The TFS integration is a nightmare in my opinion.

[deleted]

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#102
post #87

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…

It's quite true, IDE value is prepackaged, programmable editor value is flexibility. Both come with issues. Eclipse (because of Java culture mostly) is hell in resources and programmability. Emacs is seriously amazing here, but yeah I don't have a full fledged debugger out of the box. That said .. it only takes one guy to make it so. Just look at magit.. so far it's one of, if not the, best git interface.

The thing with Emacs and Vim is that I like polish. I like to tinker, but I like to know that if I need something people have banged their heads against the wall with the same tools and fixed them. With plugins and just hobbyists working on the plugins (or professionals only doing thing in their spare time) it's hard to get the level of polish high enough.

I'm a bit sad that Emacs kind of failed as a commercial IDE. Note: commercial, not proprietary. Free Software can be commercial. I guess it's because GNU never got into the second wave of UX that popped up basically in the early 90's.

Emacs badly needed something like a successful Lucid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_Inc.

That Lucid company would have had to push for UX features for all kinds of programmers, for a set of blessed extensions that are tested together, for proper documentation with modern terminology, for sane, modern defaults, etc. You know, turn a software project into a software product. Imagine Sublime Text levels of polish, but with the power of Emacs.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#103
post #70
post #51

"Every branch of every repo gets its own sandboxed directory. Your revision history in each branch, including uncommitted stuff, is persisted, as are build artifacts. When you switch contexts, each project is just as you left it." Isn't that just svn? Why force a git-shaped peg into an svn-shaped hole?

Or git worktree

Oh, I had never heard of that command before. Does it work well, i.e. does it improve your workflow?

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#104
post #29

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.…

Why did you want to use vim? If you want a full-featured modern C++ IDE on a non-windows platform, try Jetbrains CLion.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#105
post #87

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…

The whole point of emacs is that it is extensible, and easily so. That is the core thing that makes emacs great. And it means that, far from having extensions that are inferior to those on IDEs, it has many extensions that are far, far superior to the IDE equivalents. For example, magit I find a far superior git extension than the IDE equivalents. Something like org-mode simply has no rival in the world of IDEs, it is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool which contains all my notes and integrates well with "languages" even.

Or look at macro support. IDEs still have either non-existent, or comparatively poor macro support, which I consider vital. The amount of times as a developer I have to do some repetitive task, or worse, some semi-repetitive but needs a bit of intelligence here and there task, which can be accomplished using a macro with a bit of logic, is insane.

Emacs really is like a superset of IDEs. It does a whole lot of things that IDEs just don't do as well, and then it also does a bunch of things that IDEs do as well.

That is not to say I don't use IDEs. If I have to do java, I'll do it in intellij. If I have to do nearly anything else, I'll do it in emacs. And luckily, most IDEs seem to come with a set of emacs keybindings and plugins so jumping back and forth isn't even that painful.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#106
post #29
post #27

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 have jumped around platforms quite a bit, and I try to use the IDEs that are available (right now I have XCode and PyCharm open on a Mac), but there is a steep learning and setup curve, and I usually don't have the time to work through a start-from-scratch tutorial, at least not initially. I am familiar with the sinking feeling that comes with realizing that my last hope is to use the search feature of the product's own help system, as it is so rarely productive.

Stack Exchange often makes the difference, but unfortunately many of both the questions and their answers are version-specific, but do not state the version they apply to.

There is a real art to making an IDE in which how to do all the common things is easy to find, and all the more esoteric features are discoverable. Maybe game designers could help?

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#107
post #27

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.

Good ol smug, dismissive top comment with bonus um-my-favorite-tool-is-the-best-why-would-anything-else-exist.

I disagree on being dismissive or smug. I did not claim VS was superior - my intent was to point it out as obvious prior art since the article and several comments in this thread gave the impression that an integrated view to development was a 'new' way to look at things or that one required this or that combination of third party tools to manage it. In this context I feel pointing out that VS has this 'single view' methodogy as the default setting was merited.

How would have you liked me to expose the prior art on Visual Studio, other than state that it existed, that it was very nice, and that it was a bit strange it was not mentioned in the article?

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#108
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite true, IDE value is prepackaged, programmable editor value is flexibility. Both come with issues. Eclipse (because of Java culture mostly) is hell in resources and programmability. Emacs is seriously amazing here, but yeah I don't have a full fledged debugger out of the box. That said .. it only takes one guy to make it so. Just look at magit.. so far it's one of, if not the, best git interface.

The thing with Emacs and Vim is that I like polish. I like to tinker, but I like to know that if I need something people have banged their heads against the wall with the same tools and fixed them. With plugins and just hobbyists working on the plugins (or professionals only doing thing in their spare time) it's hard to get the level of polish high enough. I'm a bit sad that Emacs kind of failed as a commercial IDE.…

I lost the desire to tinker. Even well known and easy to install theming... I go vanilla.

Why I stick to emacs: light compared to most advanced editors. elisp.

If I ever need something I know I can, if someone didn't do it already, add it to emacs. When you crossed that line, it's very hard to feel stuck and unable to eval a few lines to improve your workflow.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#109
post #87

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…

The whole point of emacs is that it is extensible, and easily so. That is the core thing that makes emacs great. And it means that, far from having extensions that are inferior to those on IDEs, it has many extensions that are far, far superior to the IDE equivalents. For example, magit I find a far superior git extension than the IDE equivalents. Something like org-mode simply has no rival in the world of IDEs, it i…

For some (a lot of?) things that's true. But at that point you're basically writing your own stuff, just using a framework. You get the flexibility, but you're also "responsible" for making its level match up with that of something someone was probably paid to do (and that someone else is not always incompetent :) ).

Regarding macros, I agree. However in the languages supported by the IDE, I rarely find that I need macros. I use refactorings, which are like macros on steroids, since they understand the actual language.

I really wish there was some modern Open Source editing environment which was extendable easily and also had commercial backing for the key parts. Visual Studio Code is remarkable close to what I want, it seems to have a solid architecture. The fact that it runs on Elecron is a kind of a drawback, but Microsoft really wants to make it competitive and I expect once WebAssembly hits the shelves things could take a very interesting turn.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer IntelliJ IDEA for the majority of tasks (sadly, not git integration).

What do you mean by "not git integration"?

I personally find git integration in IDEA cumbersome and rather poorly designed. But I've seen my colleagues use it.
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