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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?

#51

For me it used to be Visual Studio + ReSharper, but last month I switched to Rider and it's been amazing. It's like VS + ReSharper without the performance issues.

I think I'm about the only person left that doesn't like IntelliJ software. I can't even stand resharper. And their Java tooling, which everyone else loves more than their own children, sucks more than anything else of theirs.

I just don't get it.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#53
post #39

Visual Studio 6, when you could drag and drop your UI, double click elements to code what they do, and all of the generated code was human readable. I'm not sure we'll ever get a development environment designed to put together software that quickly again with all of our modern expectations for design, mobile friendliness, etc.

Well, you can still do that in Visual Studio 2017 with Windows Forms. Remember when when they tried to do the same with Web Forms? What a disaster. I suspect this may have been the reason they moved to declarative UI like WPF but I personally don't buy that approach. Then again, I work on conversational interfaces now where there literally is no UI at all except a textbox and a send button..

The drag & drop web stuff they had worked fine if you didn't need anything that it couldn't provide.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#54
post #39

Visual Studio 6, when you could drag and drop your UI, double click elements to code what they do, and all of the generated code was human readable. I'm not sure we'll ever get a development environment designed to put together software that quickly again with all of our modern expectations for design, mobile friendliness, etc.

Well, you can still do that in Visual Studio 2017 with Windows Forms. Remember when when they tried to do the same with Web Forms? What a disaster. I suspect this may have been the reason they moved to declarative UI like WPF but I personally don't buy that approach. Then again, I work on conversational interfaces now where there literally is no UI at all except a textbox and a send button..

Yeah, I've done a good amount of VS2017, but WinForms is far from recommended these days, and I think VS6 was the height of easy, quick application development. I don't think anyone's come close to making something similar that holds up as well.

Someday I'll learn WPF.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#55
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

http://brackets.io/ has a live view for basic html and css. There's a package for the nodejs ecosystem called "nodemon" https://github.com/remy/nodemon That restarts the webserver on filechanges automatically. The former is very basic and I don't really use it, but nodemon is quite nifty.

Reload-on-change is a relatively common feature. While a lot of modern web programming frameworks and libraries don't rely heavily on in-memory state, this is very much a different experience from having your editor constantly communicating with a live process.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#56
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can still do that in Visual Studio 2017 with Windows Forms. Remember when when they tried to do the same with Web Forms? What a disaster. I suspect this may have been the reason they moved to declarative UI like WPF but I personally don't buy that approach. Then again, I work on conversational interfaces now where there literally is no UI at all except a textbox and a send button..

The drag & drop web stuff they had worked fine if you didn't need anything that it couldn't provide.

Yeah like 'basic web functionality'. Unless you're happy with a full page refresh every time you click literally anything, And please don't suggest the UpdatePanel as a solution..

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#59
I'd have to say PhpStorm. It makes web dev really super easy. I used to hate IDEs but now I love it so much that I use it for writing one off scripts too. Also laragon with Laravel is just amazing.

Laragon makes it super easy to configure the environment (out of the box support for wamp, git, node, ngrok, you name it..)

Re: Ask HN: What's the most productive development environment you've used?

#60
post #20

Vim + 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!

Would you mind sharing what plugins your using? I've tried combining and setting up yourcompleteme, ale and one or two others I can't recall, but it never work as flawlessly as say vs code or pycharm in terms of completion, suggestions and quick doc viewing. Are you using vim or neovim?

I use neovim with deoplete as the completion engine and all the plugins to deoplete required for my work (python, JavaScript, Go). There’s a number of other useful plugins, but that alone get me pretty close to IDE level completion.
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