Benefits of Not Using an IDE • Hacker News Board

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#41

Post by AlisdairO » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

Rd6n6 wrote: post #4

A good ide is all about auto completion and refactoring tools. The autocompletion means you don’t have to spend as much time memorizing apis, so you can focus more on simplifying your design and minimizing coupling. In something like unreal engine, the intellisense really sets ides apart. The refactoring means you can quickly and easily make large changes to make the code easier to work in. You can just work signific…

For large codebases, the code exploration features are priceless. Call hierarchy is an absurd productivity booster.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#42

Post by bbrree66 » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #34

Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b. Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most produc…

Agreed. It's obvious this is written by some pseudo intellectual who wants to feel smart and different by saying they don't use an IDE. Benefits easily out weigh any downsides.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#43

Post by nicoburns » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

codewithcheese wrote: post #35

Rd6n6 wrote: post #4

A good ide is all about auto completion and refactoring tools. The autocompletion means you don’t have to spend as much time memorizing apis, so you can focus more on simplifying your design and minimizing coupling. In something like unreal engine, the intellisense really sets ides apart. The refactoring means you can quickly and easily make large changes to make the code easier to work in. You can just work signific…

I'm surprised how many of my colleagues don't use the debugging features of their IDE. Being able to step through code line by line and see all the variables states at any time and evaluate arbitrary expressions given those states seems far superior to print/console based guesstimation. However, somehow my colleagues still do great work!

Depending on which ecosystem you're working with you may be able to get those tools elsewhere. If you're working with client-side JavaScript for example, then you have multiple choices of browsers with excellent debuggers built in.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#44

Post by MagicWishMonkey » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

I know it's a personal anecdote, but 100% of the devs I've worked with who refused to use an IDE ranged from below average to flat out bad at software development.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#45

Post by AlisdairO » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

jbverschoor wrote: post #23

> By not using an IDE, you have to remember the syntax of the language you are using, the subroutines from your own project and their arguments. You also remember (standard-)library subroutines better for your chose programming language. Use an IDE, and discover + learn the syntax by being assisted. Start biking on a unicycle, and fail. > When you have to manually find a file to change a subroutine implementation, or…

> That's a language design issue.

Agreed. And, also, who cares? Yes, Java is a mediocre language and way too verbose. I spend a bunch of time in Java and I don't notice the worst of that because I (like literally every Java dev I know) use an IDE. You shouldn't separate a language from the standard tooling it comes with/enables - they're intertwined.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#46

Post by walshemj » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

Isnt an editor with syntax highlighting, Atom for example and an IDE

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#47

Post by bigbillheck » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

I don't find any of that person's arguments particularly compelling, especially this one:

> Respect the Unix Philosophy

I have no respect for the unix philosophy.

They go on to clarify:

> (Visual Studio's poor man's autocomplete is a prime example)

And so from this I deduce that the author considers autocomplete to NOT be part of the "one thing" that an editor, under the Unix Philosophy, is supposed to do. But both emacs and vim have autocomplete capability, so either autocomplete in an editor is only philosophically acceptable if it's good enough, or emacs and vim are not worthy of the Philosophy.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#48

Post by approxim8ion » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #10

As the author points out, it does depend on the language. I switched to vim "full-time" when moving to a Go team. (Prev Java). Java is a language that does not lend itself to vim. Even just compiling and running a sufficiently large java program can be a pain without an IDE setup.

Same. I would very much like to use a text editor full-time given how strapped for resources my machine is, but I work on either Java or Angular 90% of the time. The productivity loss is too much to deal with, and the solution is to add a bizarre number of plugins to the editor to the point that it becomes somewhat of an IDE itself, without the guarantee that the plugins will interact well with each other.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#49

Post by ThePadawan » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:38 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #39

ThePadawan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I've been going back to full-fat VS after working in VS Code for a while, and boy, does VS just chug even opening a "Hello World" C# project. (I used VS at work regularly and the performance on a million-SLoC solution was quite bad, but I didn't expect it to be much better given the size of the solution)

Have you tried VS 2022 (beta)? It's 64-bit finally. It's way faster in my experience, but I don't have a million-SLoC solution laying around to test.

Not yet! Might give it a try, thanks for the idea!

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#50

Post by newbamboo » Sat, Aug 21, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

wokwokwok wrote: post #34

Listen, long story short: just say no to nonsense like this. Given the choice of a) tooling, or b) no tooling, you’re not being smart, cool or clever by choosing b. Obviously, what tools you pick are important and heavy IDEs like IntelliJ are a trade off between speed and functionality, and yeah, more nimble tools do exist, and it’s definitely worth trying different development tools to see what makes you most produc…

“Men have become the tools of their tools. Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

Henry David Thoreau

One day the IDE will do most of the coding. Users will just click “ok” and spend most of their time asking IT to reboot and reinstall things until it all just works(tm).