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Putting the I back in IDE

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#141

Post by cat199 »

pavlov wrote: post #38

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…

and yet children read picturebooks and point with their fingers to explain things while adults read text and use language..

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#142

Post by pjmlp »

zeveb wrote: post #130
pjmlp wrote: post #56

Programming like 1980! At least has colors instead of having everything in green. Really the extent people go to avoid using modern developer tools.

emacs is a modern developer tool. Its most recent version is just about to be released. It supports all major and several minor OSes. It's used by modern developers (e.g. the folks at Jane Street …). And, unlike some of its competitors, it's free and easily user-extensible.

Emacs still lacks quite a few improvements XEmacs had over it, and many Lisp Machine features are yet to be available on it.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#143

Post by craigsmansion »

pavlov wrote: post #138
craigsmansion wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Janestreet? Definitely. If you do Ocaml, you do emacs, if you do emacs, you do GNU (or some other sane unix). Anything else means you're stealing your own or company time. > a trivial difference in opinion about UI efficiency. That's one way to look at it. Another is that the quest for UI efficiency is a timesink and an upgrade threadmill susceptible to fashions. The counter to that is to learn it once, learn it…

Like I said: an unfortunate local maximum that works but hinders progress.

That's not a refutation or argument but just restating your opinion in a pejorative way.

Just drop it.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#144

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #87
agumonkey wrote: post #78

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…

[deleted]

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#145

Post by geoelectric »

arximboldi wrote: post #90
oblio wrote: 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…

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…

JetBrains IDEs work pretty well as a polyglot system. I do like the language-differentiated IDEs they have since they streamline the interface a bit to what's relevant, but most (if not all) of them are implemented as plugins to IntelliJ too. It's comparable to language-specific Emacs distros vs. modes.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#146

Post by pritambaral »

oblio wrote: post #93
arximboldi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds reasonable, you're basically investing in an ecosystem that trades flexibility for polish. 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…

I see your arguments as a meld of two separate ones:

1. Very good IDEs — which may be proprietary — do exist and have existed for a while (the Visual Studio argument); and

2. Free Software IDEs do exist and have existed for a while (the Eclipse argument).

However, neither Visual Studio nor Eclipse on its own fulfills both arguments. I think your parent was trying to say that their customized install of Emacs does.

As for the point about people being able to make a living off of an IDE for two decades ... well, that's a low bar, isn't it? Lots of people make a living off of no IDEs (the Vim argument) for decades. The argument wasn't really about acceptably good IDEs for the general public, rather about IDEs sufficiently good to the parent's standards. Something they can invest in and reap rewards off of instead of merely using it, thus implying a higher standard than just "does the job".

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#147

Post by mdaniel »

dmitriid wrote: post #110
rantanplan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar to the sibling's comment, be sure to look at the freshly released 2018.1 version: they finally included partial commits, and did so in a fantastic way

https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2018/03/intellij-idea-2018-1...

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#148

Post by 0x445442 »

noir_lord wrote: post #83
zimpenfish wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but their internal tools use 80*25 text-mode UIs A long time ago, I worked for a company wanting to sell advertising devices with an accompanying booking UI to Titan - we had a shiny web booking system; they had their crufty old 80x25 text mode system. Turns out that 80x25 text mode system was orders of magnitude faster for the day to day workflow of booking ads on devices, etc.

Indeed. I've seen two AS/400 via Telnet(-like) systems replaced with a modern GUI (first case) and a web based GUI (second case) and aside from all the usual problems associated with an en masse migration they ended up been far slower for the end user. TUI's with complete keyboard shortcuts are just hard to beat for domain specific software. Things like "Click Orders - Click Open - Click Create New Order" vs SHIFT+F9…

Yep, you want to see ultra effecient computer usage go to Fry's Electronics and watch them wiz around the TUI POS system. Actually that goes for most TUI POS systems like, say, your standard grease smudged terminal at the local UHaul office.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#149

Post by 0x445442 »

pavlov wrote: post #95
craigsmansion wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> they also get to weed out developers whose opinions would make for a poor fit 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?

Not sure about Victor but Smalltalk is highly influenced by the LISP machine. I'm not sure Kay is as against Emacs as you might think.

Re: Putting the I back in IDE

#150

Post by elcritch »

arximboldi wrote: post #90
oblio wrote: 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…

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…

I've taken up learning emacs again via spacemacs so I can have an editor with console and gui modes. The increased discover-ability has helped me a lot. But what facets of emacs proved valuable after learning them?
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