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Leapfrogging the IDE

amasad.me

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Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#21

Post by adpirz »

GreaterFool wrote: post #14

How is repl.it different from a bunch of other web IDEs that came and went without leaving a mark?

This doesn't necessarily translate to production-level programming, but I used to teach computer science to middle and high school students. I originally used Cloud9, and had to walk students through the process of setting up a Github account, going through and setting up a proper dev environment, ensuring that their file space was showing and walk them through the run server commands. Very heavy stuff and ate into valuable time every class.

With repl.it, it was simply a matter of typing out a bitly link and hitting enter and everything was set up and ready to go.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#22

Post by zandl »

I can answer the question why switch if the limited online one is sufficient; it’s because the developer is working less efficiently and is unaware of the impact on productivity and code quality.

I’ve seen this many times, variable renamed done with text replace or by hand, inconsistent formatting and headers, silly bugs that an ide could catch as you type get committed, switching between screens to test their code constantly. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just new developers aren’t getting the wisdom and expirence of the past and are repeating past mistakes instead of improving on the solutions.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#23

Post by Koshkin »

beat wrote: post #20

I don't know if this counts as the same thing, but I've recently started a Rails-based project on Google Cloud, using the cloud shell and its built-in editor. This is great because I don't have to futz around with a Vagrant environment or (worse) a straight Rails dev environment on my Mac, and I can do full-strength software development from the little Chromebook I like to carry around. A Chromebook plus a 100% cloud…

Just to be clear, what you carry around and enjoy using so much is essentially a wireless terminal to a mainframe.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#24

Post by wild_preference »

canterburry wrote: post #18

Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc. I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately fi…

Ranges from language to language.

For example, VS Code pulls TypeScript definitions of your JavaScript dependencies and thus has superior intellisense.

Also, the plugin ecosystem uses JavaScript, so it tends to be more cutting edge, especially if you're working on a JavaScript project (i.e. same language as plugins). For example, VS Code and Atom had Prettier code-formatting when IDEA didn't. And they sometimes have the best support for newer languages like Elm.

I'd be wary of painting people as junior developers just because they don't use your preferred IDE.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#25

Post by cujo »

canterburry wrote: post #18

Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc. I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately fi…

I tend to toggle back and forth between Intellij and Sublime. This is almost entirely because Intellij feels slower and less responsive. My Sublime setup gets me 90% of the way to Intellij.

I wish Intellij was as snappy as Sublime. I wish it was as intuitively keyboard driven as Sublime. I wish the community around Intellij was half as helpful as the Sublime one when it comes to plugins, extension, customization.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#26

Post by DougBTX »

canterburry wrote: post #18

Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc. I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately fi…

In VS Code especially, the level of support in the IDE very much depends on the language. For example, TypeScript has code search like Find All References that goes beyond text search, it understands classes, methods and interfaces, it supports code formatting and import organisation/cleanup.

It doesn't have as much refactoring support as eg Resharper, but it has the basics covered and honestly - even when I was using Resharper, well over 90% of the refactoring I did was renaming variables, which VS Code has covered.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#27

Post by Filligree »

styfle wrote: post #10
collyw wrote: post #4

> "I have one file called index.js" Say it all really. Online coding tools may be fine for beginners, but think it would be next to impossible to do my work with one.

What if all the features of an IDE existed for online coding tools? I actually maintain a list of these tools[0] and several of them are very close to the native experience. In particular, CodeSandbox has come a long way by basically running VS Code in the browser. [0]: https://github.com/styfle/awesome-online-ide

They still would not be nearly as fast. When I'm working with projects consisting of hundreds of files measuring hundreds of lines each, I need an IDE that's capable of using the full performance of my workstation

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#28

Post by rhacker »

canterburry wrote: post #18

Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc. I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately fi…

I think part of the trend of IDEs losing favor is that for years they controlled the build. I think that build environments have changed so much in the past 3 years or so that having the IDE control it outright has quickly become untenable. Sure, for some languages, like Java or C# I think it still makes sense to use a full-IDE. But for JS and Typescript, where you might run webpack or node or chrome or docker, the concept of an IDE understanding and providing an intuitive notion of how to run that code, is becoming harder and harder to match user expectations.

Outside of the JS/TS realm? I don't know, I can imagine Jupyter and other notebook technologies really taking off too. I don't really see those as writing programs, however, I see that more as an exercise in data preparation that can be used in some other long-running API or otherwise.

Going a little beyond too - I am seeing more and more shops (including ours) that are adopting an ALL JS/TS approach and leveraging React, GraphQL on top of Node. I think the reason is that we're collectively deciding on reducing our code knowledge footprint. Companies are favoring fewer languages because JS/TS is "good enough" now to handle the backend of something major, it begs the question on why we should use Java or something similar for our APIs. We are also finding places where we can write something on the front end, and magically also run it on the backend for doing some similar operations.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#29

Post by skybrian »

canterburry wrote: post #18

Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc. I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately fi…

IDE's tend to work best for people who work full time on a few projects and make complex edits. Then it's worth setting up the IDE properly, indexing the project, maintaining the IDE configuration, and learning the shortcuts.

But if you are jumping into a lot of different projects that were written by a lot of different teams, and making tiny, local edits, configuring an IDE properly for each new project is a pain. Startup time on a new project is more important than advanced refactoring. It's hard to beat an editor for opening a file or directory you've never seen before and making a quick edit. You can be done before a more powerful IDE has even finished indexing the source code.

The newer editors are gradually getting more IDE features without losing fast startup, so I find them appealing even with a lot of experience with IntelliJ.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#30

Post by Filligree »

geocar wrote: post #5
flavio81 wrote: post #2

TL;DR: Repl.it member (amasad, see note) wants to promote Repl.it by saying that more people are using Repl.it and thus it is the modern stuff because modern is having "no IDE, just a modern repl" and etc. So "modern, 2018" is basically having what Lisp developers have had since the early '80s. * https://repl.it/site/about

> what Lisp developers have had since the early '80s We absolutely did not have a globally, network-accessible terminal with pay-as-you-go computer time. I have no experience or interest in repl.it, but I think you're understating things somewhat.

What you did have was Symbolics, and I think this still falls somewhat short of that experience.
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