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Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

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Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#51

Post by yoodenvranx »

founderling wrote: post #6

When you guys think about all the developers you know, do you rather see a positive or a negative correlation between the usage of high level tools and developer productivity? In other words, is your experience that developers who use an IDE are more productive then developers who only use a text editor? In my experience, the (very few) developers I know who only use VIM or Emacs are way more productive then those wh…

I think it really depends on the type of work you are doing.

- If you do low-level stuff like writing a hardware driver or a kernel module you will most likely be fine with a normal text editor because all in all it's not that much code

- My friends in a large PHP shop all use PhpStorm to work on large projects. They all tell me that you are way more productive in PHP with the specialized tools that PhpStorm offers. In the whole company there is not a single person who uses emacs or vi for PHP (a lot of them use vi for everything else, but not for PHP)

- I used to have a job where I had to switch between 2 dozen projects in the span of a few weeks and fix things. A proper IDE makes it much easier to navigate code you have never seen before. Without IDEs I would not have been productive in that sort of job at all

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#52

Post by class4behavior »

m0zg wrote: post #20
founderling wrote: post #6

When you guys think about all the developers you know, do you rather see a positive or a negative correlation between the usage of high level tools and developer productivity? In other words, is your experience that developers who use an IDE are more productive then developers who only use a text editor? In my experience, the (very few) developers I know who only use VIM or Emacs are way more productive then those wh…

It's a wonderful example of selection bias. Basically, vim/emacs is likely to select for people who are "good at computers" and reject everyone else. These people, in turn, are more likely than average to be excellent programmers. But I wouldn't necessarily draw the arrow of causation in this case. Not only does this not mean that IDE users are worse, it also doesn't mean that there are fewer great programmers among…

There is no selection bias because no selection has been done. It's up to you how you interpret the aggregated anecdotes.

Such queries are meant to discover notable impact, based on which you might invest in a proper evaluation.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#53

Post by msclrhd »

founderling wrote: post #6

When you guys think about all the developers you know, do you rather see a positive or a negative correlation between the usage of high level tools and developer productivity? In other words, is your experience that developers who use an IDE are more productive then developers who only use a text editor? In my experience, the (very few) developers I know who only use VIM or Emacs are way more productive then those wh…

I've personally found tests to be invaluable. Yes, they take longer to write than just writing the initial code, but they help save time on testing bugs in the future and ensuring that the code you have written does not regress, especially when refactoring the code.

I've not necesserily always used test driven development, but something close to it, especially for non-UI code where I try and aim for high test coverage.

Tests also help when writing code that implements specifications (JSON parser, XML parser, JavaScript engine, etc.) as you can have tests for each part of the specification and the various error cases.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#54

Post by nnq »

Maybe people should realize that the problem is with the JS libraries ecosystem and how most are build in a way that "just jumping into a lib/framework to read its code and see what it does" can't seam to be feasible anymore.

For example, in a React app if I'd want to jump from a `Route` import from react-router to it's readable code definition [1], NO IDE or editor around is capable a properly doing the jump, I either get to a Typescript definition (VSCode does this - imo the worst possible behavior) or to some unreadable transpiler outputed code.

This creates a huge divide between framework/library/component-author and "lowly" client/user-programmers.

Compare this to the Python ecosystem where basically any editor or IDE can help me jump to the right place in a library's nice and readable code, and even in the worst case where the author didn't bother to write either tests or docs I can still make use of foreign code just fine...

[1]: https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/blob/master/pa...

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#55

Post by arcturus17 »

jjeaff wrote: post #44
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of the hundreds of devs I've worked with, I can think of exactly two who use(d) vim to edit code with any regularity. Both are fairly proficient above-average devs overall, but I'm pretty sure they also use IDEs heavily and only use vim for quick things. Beyond a certain level of codebase complexity, there is simply no way to do the job with a text editor, even with fancy macros. Vim is an elegant tool, but is si…

Interesting. From reading HN, you would think every coder worth anything is hacking away with emacs or vim on black and green terminal screens. But I suppose people that use emacs and vim are like vegans. Those that do, are definitely going to tell you about it.

What’s with this vim vs IDE debate anyway - vim works wonderfully with the IntelliJ suite and many other IDEs.

If you’ve been doing vim or emacs since the 80s then great but I’m not going to go through months of configuration hell to repurpose vim into an IDE when I can do it the other way around.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#56

Post by marton78 »

m0zg wrote: post #20
founderling wrote: post #6

When you guys think about all the developers you know, do you rather see a positive or a negative correlation between the usage of high level tools and developer productivity? In other words, is your experience that developers who use an IDE are more productive then developers who only use a text editor? In my experience, the (very few) developers I know who only use VIM or Emacs are way more productive then those wh…

It's a wonderful example of selection bias. Basically, vim/emacs is likely to select for people who are "good at computers" and reject everyone else. These people, in turn, are more likely than average to be excellent programmers. But I wouldn't necessarily draw the arrow of causation in this case. Not only does this not mean that IDE users are worse, it also doesn't mean that there are fewer great programmers among…

This is not an example for selection bias, but rather that correlation does not imply causation.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#58

Post by arcturus17 »

__m wrote: post #35

I love the jetbrains toolbox. I do unity development with Rider, Android development with Android studio, web development with webstorm, python automation and ai learning with pycharm, java development with idea and I use it as diff/merge tool like the author (additionally you can toggle blame mode, which shows you the last person who edited the individual lines, at what time and with a color coding that highlights r…

I do Java with IntelliJ and everything else with VSCode but I’m about to switch everything to IntelliJ. Microsoft has done a tremendous job with VSCode - I’m particularly amazed at how fast it’s risen - but honestly every time I switch between Idea and Code I miss the former.

Re: Why I Switched from Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm

#59

Post by kkarakk »

eridius wrote: post #9
Niksko wrote: post #4

While VS Code presumably can do almost everything Webstorm (and other Jetbrains products) can, my experience in my fairly large software company is that most of the people that use VS Code don't actually bother to install the plugins to bring it up to feature parity. Out of the box functionality is underrated, even seemingly among devs who have the skills and knowledge to tinker.

VSCode has a ton of extensions but very frequently there's no good information about which extensions you should actually use, and whether you need to configure them to get the best behavior. For example, the other day I went to install a GraphQL extension for syntax highlighting and there was something like a half-dozen competing extensions, with no good way of figuring out why I should use one versus the other. I e…

MS's attitude towards package managers has always confused me. even in vs2019, typing in Microsoft.something sometimes brings up paid extensions as the first result but not always. no way to rate an extension with an explanation in nuget(or vscode) means i'm usually googling "good extension for [x]" instead of using the package manager search
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