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Leapfrogging the IDE

amasad.me

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Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#31

Post by beat »

Koshkin wrote: post #23
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.

Is that a Bad Thing? The alternative is to carry a snowflake environment around with me.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#32

Post by C1sc0cat »

zandl wrote: post #22

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 c…

From experience using atom to develop some perl integration scripts for ecommerce I found the variable completion and knowledge of perl very good.

The trouble is these enterprise dev tools assume you have bleeding edge hardware.

Back when I developed in Oracle we had to have special pc builds and then spend over £2000 on memory and more again to buy a 20inch monitor just to get it to work!- and it still crashed every 15 minutes

However quake came out at the same time and the 20 inchers where amazing to play networked games on.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#33

Post by asdkhadsj »

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…

> Amongst the current crop of engineers, there seems to be a stigma against even trying Eclipse or IntelliJ. I kind of feel like junior engineers are missing out on discovering some much more powerful tooling and forming their own opinions.

For me it's the text editing features that these IDEs lack. I'm definitely giving up advanced language integration, but I (and many) make the choice to do this for more powerful and/or preferred text capabilities.

Vim, Emacs, Kakoune being my main examples. Not just a "vim mode" - I've never used one of those that was even remotely useful for me, heh.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#34

Post by jramsay »

amasad, I enjoyed the perspective of your article. I agree an engineer with many years of experience is going to have different expectations to someone who is entering the profession today. I think it's similar to my perspective on the iPad – I find it interesting but limited because my experience and mental model of computing is very different to someone who is growing up with an iPad in hand.

I work on the Web IDE at GitLab (among other things) which we built after we noticed that there were a few situations in our day to day work on GitLab where we didn't need a full local development environment, like updating documentation or addressing simple review comments. It doesn't replace a local IDE from me yet, but it is helpful and we hope we can make it more useful in more situations where local IDEs have shortcomings. I think the effort and maintenance of a local development environment is also a cost that is frequently overlooked – reinstalling dependencies is a headache that disappears in an automated ephemeral environment like repl.it or where we're heading at GitLab.

But that seems like it's just an iteration on the status quo rather than leap frogging to a post-IDE world. I think the idea of online interactive development can go so much further. Maybe we can integrate interactive editors/terminals/previews with our planning and code review tools so that experimentation and exploration are easier and happen in line in the discussions we have planning the next feature to build. I put a few dot points down on this line of thinking last week https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/533 but I'd be interested to hear some of your more concrete ideas of what a post-IDE world might look like.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#35

Post by crispyambulance »

skybrian wrote: post #29
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. S…

     > 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.
I can't imagine this _ever_ being the case. Setup of an IDE is trivial compared to wrapping one's head around the first time look at a new project. I mean, you're talking about cracking open a new project you've never seen, making an edit and "being done" in a matter of a few minutes !

This is perhaps doable if you're talking about assembly-line-cookie-cutter projects, or maybe you're talking about super-geniuses? It takes me a minimum of hours to days before I'm ready to "make a quick edit" on a project I've never seen.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#36

Post by RussianCow »

cujo wrote: post #25
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.

I try all the popular editors (Sublime, VS Code, and Atom) every few months, because I would LOVE to replace IntelliJ IDEA for this very reason. That said, I always come back to it because the intelligence and refactoring features are vastly superior to those of any other editor I have used. If I could have the best of both worlds, I would switch in a heartbeat, but I just haven't found that to be the case yet—though I'm hopeful that other editors will catch up soon.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#37

Post by RussianCow »

crispyambulance wrote: post #35
skybrian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. S…

> 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. I can't imagine this _ever_ being the case. Setup of an IDE is trivial compared to wrapping one's head around the first time look at a new project. I mean, you're talking about cracking open a new project you've never see…

Plus, per-project IDE configuration should be extremely minimal—maybe 15-20 minutes at most?—so I can't imagine that ever being a bottleneck for a new project.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#38

Post by twoquestions »

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…

Can personally confirm, I tried learning .Net Core by starting a MVC project on my Mac with VS Code, and after a few months of pain I found Rider which works on both my Windows and Mac machines, and works much better.

As far as I'm concerned, either go whole hog with an IDE or stick with lightweight editors like Sublime/Vim/Emacs and rely on CLI tools to find errors.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#39

Post by amasad »

rpeden wrote: post #19

A couple of observations: - Something like Light Table would probably seem like a step up for repl.it users, instead of a step down. - It can take a long time to reach the point where it feels like there's a big payoff from using IDEs and similar tool. Now , I definitely see the value of being able to do something like set a breakpoint in Visual Studio, step through a bit of code and observer local values changing, a…

I think for someone not familiar with repl.it and just reading this might get the impression that we are anti-IDE features. That is not at all the point. In fact we think Code Intellisense is essential. We start a Language Server for many of the languages that we support: https://repl.it/blog/intel

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#40

Post by ken »

It sounds like users are trying to get back to working with a system image.

I have trouble labeling it "post-IDE". Depending on whether you consider Smalltalk/Lisp machines to be "IDEs", it's either "original IDE", or "pre-IDE".

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