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Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#421

Post by mekster »

ekzy wrote: post #323
scanr wrote: post #26

The Jetbrains suite. Lightens the cognitive load, makes it easier to refactor and keep code tidy. All of which allow me build better software. For almost everything else e.g. git, learning how to use the command line instead of a UI is the best way for me to learn how the tooling works.

I agree. I’ve been using IntelliJ ultimate for a few months now and I don’t see myself going back to sublime or emacs. I do work mostly with ruby, typescript, golang and occasionally clojure. I recently found out that with the Ultimate version, you can install all the language plugins and won’t need the other IDE like Goland, rubymine, webstorm etc... They’re just plugins. So all your settings can live in one place

License for Ultimate is cheap enough that if you're going to buy 3 or more of their product, it's better to just buy Ultimate (assuming the tools are provided by plugins in Ultimate).

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#422

Post by mekster »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #75
scanr wrote: post #26

The Jetbrains suite. Lightens the cognitive load, makes it easier to refactor and keep code tidy. All of which allow me build better software. For almost everything else e.g. git, learning how to use the command line instead of a UI is the best way for me to learn how the tooling works.

Unbelievably amazing to be able to shift-click on syntax and jump to the source - even works pretty well in dynamic languages. I HATE using a Gem then needing to break my train of thought to pull up the official documentation to see what an API interface looks like. Ctrl+click. In and out in 15 seconds.

After a while, you'd think why this isn't the default in other editors. (At least VSCode jumps to obvious sources.)

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#423

Post by xs83 »

- Debugger - doesn't matter which one - just stop using echo / print for complex debugging.

- Good IDE - I prefer Jetbrains products, once you learn all the shortcuts for the various functions it just makes things much faster than constantly switching between windows.

- Sublime text - Not as an IDE but columnar editing and fast construction / munging of data files is crucial for efficiency

- Linux / Bash / Shell - learn the tools - sure you can write a script to do most things but learning how to pipe some commands together to get some certain output is universally useful. Learn the basic VIM key bindings, you should be able to comfortably copy,paste,save,select etc

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#424

Post by aryc19 »

auslegung wrote: post #396
tkainrad wrote: post #89

For me, the transition from Bash to Zsh has been a huge efficiency boost. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation describes this in detail: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#swi... . The best thing is, there is no initial productivity hit…

Today I switched from zsh to fish and I'm already much happier. Was using zsh for 4+ years, too

What benefits do you see in fish when compared to zsh?

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#425

Post by ribadeodev »

allworknoplay wrote: post #331
amirathi wrote: post #240

Reading official documentation when working with new tools/frameworks. Googling every hurdle as it comes & over relying on StackOverflow is neither effective nor satisfying. Some of the projects out there have amazing documentation (e.g. VueJS, Kafka). It's best to read the overview & skim high level stuff to understand the core components/principles/terminologies. It makes it so much easier & enjoyable to use those…

Why isn't this higher? Give everything a good read before really working. You don't need to remember everything, but you need to know what's there so you don't wind up reinventing wheels, endlessly googling with the wrong search terms, or doing things people who use the tool correctly find inscrutable. It's so important. I will note that this is much easier to do well when you're a more experienced engineer than it i…

I think the main problem with this approach is the all-or-nothing problem. When reading official docs is not always clear when you already have everything that you need. Reading the whole doc is usually not a possibility considering most modern tools have easily 100+ pages that go down the rabbit hole.

In short, good official documentation is scarce and time to read is even more so.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#426

Post by kadonoishi »

slim wrote: post #318
mxschumacher wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had a revelation: When typing longer shell commands it can be time-consuming to go back and make changes, turns out you can use Vim style cursor movements within the Fish: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28444740/how-to-use-vi-m...

you can do that in bash too, and any cli that uses readline library

  set -o vi
Starts you in insert mode. To go back to the usual command-line editing,

  set -o emacs

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#427

Post by alasdair_ »

Jeaye wrote: post #22

- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…

> Vim; modal editing and vi-like navigation can blow open your mind. Explore the existing plugins to accomplish everything you want to be able to do. It's all there.

The reason I end up ditching Vim after a few weeks every time I try it (4 serious attempts now) and go back to IntelliJ (which I’ve used for two decades) is that I never found a solution to the following trivial issue:

Imagine you have a large Java codebase and you want to refactor all occurrences of a method called “doFoo()” to give it a better name - how do you do this in Vim?

This is a single keypress in IntelliJ and I use this function very frequently but I never found a way to do it in Vim.

Note: I only want to change THIS doFoo() method, not the hundred other doFoo() methods in the codebase.

Also note: yea, this includes all implementations of the interface, all abstract classes, all classes that extend a a class that implements the interface and all other funky polymorphic things, and NO unrelated code. And do it all in one keypress, don’t have me manually go through line by line.

Any ideas if this is possible now?

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#428

Post by positr0n »

alasdair_ wrote: post #427
Jeaye wrote: post #22

- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…

> Vim; modal editing and vi-like navigation can blow open your mind. Explore the existing plugins to accomplish everything you want to be able to do. It's all there. The reason I end up ditching Vim after a few weeks every time I try it (4 serious attempts now) and go back to IntelliJ (which I’ve used for two decades) is that I never found a solution to the following trivial issue: Imagine you have a large Java codeb…

I am about as hardcore a vim user as they get and I would never edit Java without an IDE.

That being said the first thing I do after installing IntelliJ is open the plugin settings and install IdeaVim.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#429

Post by torb-xyz »

braindongle wrote: post #61
Jeaye wrote: post #22

- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…

An excellent list. Regarding functional programming, I recommend starting with a gentle approach that doesn't require picking up a new language: 1. Stop creating counters/loops and become facile with map, reduce, and the like. This will shift your thinking away from blocks and toward functions. 2. Take the time to really understand what side effects are, and start avoiding them everywhere they are not necessary. Keep…

This! What is funny that is that I started doing this before I knew anything at all about functional programming, I just started to avoid stuff that I had painful experiences with.

Later I read a couple of chapter of SICP and then I really changed and my programming hasn't been the same since. The language I use at work is JavaScript and while SICP isn't for JavaScript, nothing else has changed my JavaScript for the better to that degree.

Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?

#430

Post by chrischen »

pk_kinetic wrote: post #295
vorticalbox wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have started down the fp router with ramda and ramda-adjunct. Though other people at my work dislike it due to them not understanding what's going on

There could be other reasons for disliking it other than not understanding what’s going on. Maybe other people are working on tight deadlines and don’t have the time or mental energy trying to understand an entirely unfamiliar programming paradigm. I would want to program in functional too, but I would seek out projects or teams that already use functional. I’d never introduce a functional language to an already esta…

If you practice domain driven design, you can always start out isolated projects or even just new modules if your code is sufficiently modularized. I started out by making a new library/module with Ramda, and then it's consumed via a function call that anyone programming in any style can use.

Agreed that functional patterns can be hard to understand if you don't know the patterns, but if you do know them they are much easier to understand and reason about the code. It's a long term investment, and one that frankly I believe will be inevitable as more and more people start doing programming work.

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