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Leapfrogging the IDE

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Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#41

Post by pswenson »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #33
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 a…

The jetbrains editors are amazing, if you learn the keystrokes. I see few bother to explore/learn them though... I haven't found an editor that matches the features.

My main prob with jetbrains is project setup sucks, and the support for quick editing an arbitrary file is awkward. so for quick editing of a file I end up in atom or vim. I'm currently trying to get vs code's editor to be as similar as possible to intellij as possible. it looks like code's editor is pretty solid and full featured.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#42

Post by AcerbicZero »

I've read the comments here, and perhaps due to my job not being purely software development, I have a different impression of Repl.It. I'm much more of an infrastructure guy than a developer, (DevOps? So overused) and I'm not overly ashamed to admit I learned to code with Powershell, mostly via their integrated scripting environment. Trying to make the switch from ISE to pure Python was extremely difficult for me, because I was so deep into the REPL style, and I just wasn't prepared to have things obfuscated and invisible. I wanted to re-run specific lines of code, and determine variable values on the fly, so I could adjust if needed.

Eventually, I learned Ruby (and abused Pry for a long time) "correctly" and I"m re-learning Python the proper way now (and abusing pdb), mostly with VS Code, but there are some very large gaps that are easily filled with a good REPL, so I find myself popping over to Repl.it to test out some snippet that isn't doing what I expect. Perhaps there is an IDE setup that would do what I want while enabling me to be more productive, but learning a (usually lightly documented) tool, full of various assumptions, while trying to learn the actual language, AND get useful work done, is not an ideal combination.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#44

Post by kakarot »

rhacker wrote: post #28
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 c…

I disagree. Webstorm provides all of the tools you need to customize your build, you don't have to use them at all but they're there when you need it.

Webstorm integrates with popular build tools like Webpack and Gulp, and adds support for more tooling all of the time through plugins.

There is really no reason to use another IDE for JS/TS unless you can't afford its very reasonable price.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#45

Post by jonhohle »

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…

One of my first jobs was writing PHP when editors only had syntax highlighting support for the language. I learned to write, debug, and refactor in Vim and 15 years later I’ve continued to do the same for Java, C, C++, JS, etc. Projects with 10s of KLOC (one of them might be 100s).

It’s a different state of mind from IDE users. Not better or worse, just different. I’d hate to be stuck in IntelliJ all day, but most of my colleagues love it. As long as we’re all productive, to each their own.

That said, I’m a polyglot, so learning specific IDEs and plugins for all of the different languages and DSLs I use throughout the week sounds miserable to me).

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#46

Post by kakarot »

RussianCow wrote: post #37
crispyambulance wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you're correctly automating and using templates, setting up the base for a new project shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#47

Post by kakarot »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #33
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 a…

What are some text-editing features that you find IntelliJ lacking?

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#48

Post by pantalaimon »

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 never got an IDE to properly work with a C project. Even vendor provided IDEs tend to break in many subtle ways.

There are just too many opaque things going on, everything is slow and if you don't sick to the workflow intended by the authors of the IDE, everything is lost.

I feel like if the language has not been designed with an IDE in mind, it's hard to get the integration right.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#49

Post by amasad »

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.

Where did you get this from? The blog you're reading this on is built and hosted on Repl.it (https://amasad.me/__repl) and it's source is 50 files and if you count node_modules that's thousands of files.

Re: Leapfrogging the IDE

#50

Post by amasad »

Filligree wrote: post #27
styfle wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's true, especially for client-side based online IDEs. At Repl.it we have a hybrid approach where a lot of the IDE-like functions like code intellisense run on the server: https://repl.it/blog/intel
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