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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#551

Post by keithnz »

nitemice wrote: post #542
keithnz wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find CLion really nice for writing C++ + Jetbrains Vim bindings are pretty good

I tried it a loooong time ago, for C, and I couldn't get the hand of it, even though I had used IntelliJ a bunch. I've heard it's much better than when they launched it, but our build system is so eccentric that I don't think it'd get along well at my work.

yeah, I tried it when it first came along, and I didn't get along with it too well, but it seems quite good now. But yes, possibly might be tricky with different kinds of build environments, I haven't really dug into that side too much.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#552

Post by AlphENsign_Tech »

willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

Nothing beats fully CLI workflow with Vim (with some continent configs). All these GUI editors, to me, feel bulky, slow and bloated.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#553

Post by higerordermap »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #547

I'm stuck. I'm writing Go and VueJS. I tried Goland but it was too Java-y and too complex - there are thousands of settings. 4 different search options. 5 different methods of getting to the declaration for a function (and I'm never sure which one I should be using). I ended up spending more time messing with the editor than writing code, and there were too many incidents where I accidentally triggered a feature with…

I bind shortcut keys in vim to common ones, something like this:

    :map ^Q :wq^M
It works good enough for me. I use vim keybindings also but this is sometimes useful.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#555

Post by guytv »

necubi wrote: post #102
stefan_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a hugely undervalued feature, and no other editors seem to provide anything remotely close. I found it particularly useful for the COVID work from home - I yeeted my work laptop into a corner and just SSH into it to continue working with the ergonomics of my home desktop machine.

Not to be that guy, but emacs has had this for years via tramp.

... and now he's the president. that shows ya!

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#556

Post by dragonwriter »

thu2111 wrote: post #540
paxys wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While editors like IntelliJ are definitely more polished out of the box, something that may not be apparent is that internally they are all standardizing on tooling and protocols put in place by VS Code in the last few years. Language toolchains are now expected to provide IDE-specific features on their own (by implementing a language server), and so IDEs themselves don't need to focus on making the language better.…

Most language toolchains are held together by small teams of volunteers or corporates (Apple, MS) that sell their own IDEs. They struggle to provide even the basics like solid fast compilers, portability, debuggers that aren't gdb, profilers that work and so on. Look at Go, Rust, Swift. All of them are fighting with basics like performance and language evolution. And now you want them to implement most of an IDE as w…

> How much money is MS willing to throw into the VS Code project?

A lot. Not that they have to do it alone, because a lot of the work on VS Code features is done by other people with their own motives (some volunteer community types, but also each of the major cloud platform vendors is investing in VSCode integration into their systems, too, and the same is true for lots of other firms.)

> Its lack of revenue model limits them

If they are imminently going to be selling a hosted editing environment built around it (Github Codespaces), does it really lack a revenue model?

> a free IDE that competes with their own revenue generating VS product

Even with VS, they've long focussed on subscription services not software licenses as the main revenue source. “Visual Studio” subscriptions (formerly MSDN) are the big push, and most of what comes with that isn't the IDE.

And VSCode is very well integrated with lots of the services they are selling.

> VSCode is going to be stuck focusing on the JavaScript/web stack for a long time and won't receive a lot of funding to grow out of that.

It's not stuck there now, and right now MS’s biggest push in terms of domains seems to be ML/AI. I think VSCode is poised to do quite well for— in fact, has largely already won much of—everything that isn't enterprise Java, where, yeah, there’s a lot of time and money on the alternatives and not a lot of MS resources devoted to competing.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#557

Post by higerordermap »

macinjosh wrote: post #156

If you want a text editor with longevity try vim or emacs. They aren't dependent on the benevolence of a greedy corporation. Over time VSCode _will_ be raided by the bean counters at MS and it will begin to track you, give you ads about MS products, and lock you in to their ecosystem. I'll never understand why a professional developer would give so much influence over their work to the likes of MS, JetBrains, etc. Su…

I don't understand why a professional programmer sounds like a privacy activist. When they try to lock in, we would know, and someone will fork.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#558

Post by GordonS »

varispeed wrote: post #228
willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it as knowledge is scattered in many places and not always up to date. Then it still likes to stall from time to time or sometimes doesn't register key presses properly. It's a poor user experience, but even worse is that alternatives are often worse. I wish there was an e…

> From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it

This hasn't been my experience of JetBrains Rider at all - granted that startup does take a few seconds, but after that it seems to fly.

> Then it still likes to stall from time to time or sometimes doesn't register key presses properly

This was my experience with Visual Studio; I used it for over a decade because it is a great IDE - but performance and stability has never been great, and eventually I just couldn't stand the occasional lag any more and jumped ship to Rider. My experience there has been very different - it's rammed with at least as many features as Visual Studio, but has been rock solid, and never lags in use.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#559

Post by oblio »

greyman wrote: post #548
willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

I agree, I used VSCode for Python programming, until I found Pycharm is better. I also used it for Go programming, but later found Goland to be better. But what confuses me is that the article always references it as a "Text Editor", not an IDE. As a text editor it might be the best, but as far as I am concerned, I just don't need "standalone" text editor. I don't have usage for it. I use IDE for programming, and as…

If you spend your entire day in a huge project with a ton of code and work together with a large team of software developers, you'll probably use an IDE. Your workflow probably involves launching the IDE once per day or even leaving it open all the time.

If you do mostly consulting work, small projects, switching between languages with poor IDE support (usually dynamic languages), you'll probably use a smart editor. You'll launch that editor multiple times per day, close it, reopen it, etc.

We should talk more about workflows, there are a ton of them and they're very different in my experience.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#560

Post by partyboat1586 »

lmm wrote: post #268
derefr wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fancy IDEs are lubricants for high-friction languages. If a language is already low-friction, there won't be much benefit to be gained from an IDE, as even a plain text editor will already get you near to optimal productivity in said language. Personally, I'd rather use a plain-old "code editor" (with at most syntax highlighting, but no snippets, let alone autocomplete), in part because doing so will actively steer m…

> Imagine if there was a hammer that was so badly-balanced that—despite being not too hard to lift—you needed to be wearing a powered exoskeleton to accurately hold and swing it. That'd be a bad hammer, right? Hammers are hand-tools; it's an expectation that they'll work when used "manually", i.e. with raw human capability alone. I remember people making similar arguments when cars started to have power steering. > P…

With an exoskeleton I can lift a bigger hammer. A bigger hammer is more powerful.
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