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Benefits of Not Using an IDE

alexander-hansen.dev

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Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#341

Post by mst »

fartcannon wrote: post #279
mst wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "real men use vi" type superiority complex failure mode is intensely annoying (and I say this as somebody who often has original ex-vi installed) but the inverted version where you just have a superiority complex from the opposite direction isn't actually any better. It continues to amaze me that "it's worth becoming familiar with a wide range of tools and then pick the one that's going to work best for you…

Def. Just be careful not to read passion as a superiority complex, or a recommendation as condemnation.

This is why normally I err on the side of complaining at "anti-IDE" people since my setup is way more minimalist than most of theirs so at least I'm complaining about people who're theoretically on the same side :)

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#342

Post by VelkaMorava »

This is truly a HackerNews moment. IDEs bring optional usefull stuff you can ignore if you want. Yet here in comments we have autists arguing that using IDEs (=option stuff you can ignore) is bad vs using their favourite 40 year old text editor in terminal. Jesus christ you people are funny.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#343

Post by eitland »

bccdee wrote: post #165
drunkpotato wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. Contrastingly, the worst, slowest developers I've worked with rely on their IDE without understanding what it's doing for them, and are helpless in new/unsupported situations. They also, 100% of the time, screw up their git repositories on a regular basis, and need someone who knows what they're do…

The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them. Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter? Is there so much boilerplate or X…

> Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter?

Can you say what language/platform you talk abojt here?

I currently work in Kotlin with IntelliJ where sadly the only working IDE is IntelliJ,but you can build it just fine and even fix bugs using whatever editor you want.

I also maintain a lot of React code, used to work on .Net Core and some plain old C# before Core, I've maintained Angular and before that Java, older Delphi versions and even PHP.

The only projects that had the problem you talk about were

- Visual Studio (not Visul Studio Code) projects from before .Net core

- and old Delphi projects.

That said, I'm kind of stuck with IntelliJ now because of Kotlin (which is an awesome language) but I miss NetBeans a lot and how it - instead of saving everything in its own configuration files - simply accepted Maven .pom files as configuration, meaning uncluttered repos and still having all config synced and up to date everywhere. (Maven is well though out so if you just accept the defaults the files are small and contain only the things they need to contain like name, namespace and version, dependencies and necessary configuration.)

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#344

Post by eitland »

szatkus wrote: post #227
rzwitserloot wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? In the java ecosystem at least, the answer is no. But in highly CI-based situations, the answer is still no, but you DO need the CI system to be up, and the only way to run a test at all is to just commit something and see the CI system run it, e.g. because the tests require a database engine that isn't installed on your development machine.…

In my current organization I saw a project, where there is no Maven. The build system is a couple of configuration files for Eclipse IDE and that's the only way to run it. I'm glad I didn't have to do anything around that.

I had to fix one such case 6 years ago where the build procedure was to build in IntelliJ.

It took a day or two to get kt over to Maven: basically create a Maven file, make sure everything were in the correct standard Java layout, then build and unzip the war file and compare it to the unzipped war file from the existing build process repeatedly while getting the last tweaks in place.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#345

Post by jcelerier »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #115
jcelerier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if people just aren't aware, but vi and emacs have been doing this since at least the 90s. This isn't some fancy feature that requires an IDE. Recently the support has improved even more through LSP. No, rtags & friends aren't remotely comparable to an IDE which has a semantic understanding of the code, and will catch the uses without false positives.

I mean, I think they are? Sure jumping to a generic definition like getId will give you more choices, but i know which one i want. Having to push space and then 9 to get the second page and choose the one i want isn't the end of the world. Recently LSP provides exactly what you desire anyways with context sensitive jumps. Edit: Regardless, perhaps our difference here lies around what the minimum specification is. My…

> I mean, I think they are? Sure jumping to a generic definition like getId will give you more choices, but i know which one i want. Having to push space and then 9 to get the second page and choose the one i want isn't the end of the world.

I often do codebase-wide renamings. I would definitely lose a lot of time if I had to check every single instance of "getId" as you say (to give more precise figures, if I want to rename an "id" I get ~2000 matches). With my IDE I can just ctrl-shift-r and rename any symbol and it works without me having to think about it.

> Recently LSP provides exactly what you desire anyways with context sensitive jumps.

that's likely implementation issues but LSP for C++ in 2021 is definitely not as good & integrated as e.g. native clang integration for parsing.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#346

Post by jcelerier »

lawn wrote: post #282
jcelerier wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanilla vim without any extension ? Otherwise you're just reimplementing your own IDE by hand in your vim config

Obviously extensions. And it's not "reimplementing" the whole IDE, it's choosing and configuring parts to work just the way you want it to, and it's usually done in a handful of lines.

a handful of lines + the additional processes that do the parsing behind the scene. Just because it's split across multiple processes doesn't not make it an IDE.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#347

Post by sharikone »

I always take this kind of opinions with a grain of salt but I also don't like bloated IDEs, like the author.

But it's a general and trivial comparison. Like using MS word vs markdown, or Ubuntu vs Arch or Alpine.

It all comes down to your use case and it's not black and white. My Swiss knife is VS Code, arguably an IDE-minus, or an editor-plus. And given that I work all day on software it happens that I occasionally go down (vim) or up (XCode, Visual Studio, Android Studio) and I have no problem with that.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#348

Post by wokwokwok »

falcolas wrote: post #163
lultimouomo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best developers I've found are the ones who know how to work without an IDE, even if their preference is to use one. The best swimmers can stay afloat with pounds and pounds of weight dragging the down; the worst swimmers will drown. Doesn't mean weighing you down makes you a better swimmer.

Ironically, it would make you a better swimmer - it will help you build up strength, stamina, and technique. An excellent choice in analogies.

...this is actually a great analogy.

Yes, it does; but when you're trying to set a record swimming the English Channel, or escaping from a sinking ship you'd be an idiot to do it deliberately weighing yourself down with weights.

I suppose there's something to be said for both ways of doing things ultimately, depending on what situation you're in, and what your goal is.

...but unconditionally advising people to swim with weights, is simply bad advice.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#349

Post by smw »

bdcravens wrote: post #185
adrian_b wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very large difference between a very smart source code editor (e.g. Visual Studio Code) and a complete IDE. I consider the first essential and the second completely useless. For editing or just navigating the source files, the smarter the editor is, the better. On the other hand I have never seen any IDE where the management of projects (e.g. adding/deleting/moving/renaming files and setting compilation/li…

It also depends on the language. I don't think I'd consider working in a .NET project with an IDE, but it's overkill for Ruby or Javascript projects.

Rubymine can, with one click, make an ER diagram of your ActiveRecord model -- from the code, not the db schema. That pays for itself right there, especially if you're learning someone else's code base. Try it for a day, you'll never go back.

Re: Benefits of Not Using an IDE

#350

Post by Kwpolska »

Yajirobe wrote: post #234
bccdee wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them. Do I have to spin up a whole session of the IDE just to run my test suite? Do I have to dig through eleven nested GUI settings dialogues to find out what the command to build the damn project is, just so I can tweak a build parameter? Is there so much boilerplate or X…

> The thing I hate most about IDEs is when they insinuate themselves into a project's development workflow so deeply that you can't make do without them. Isn't this the case with Android Studio? Is it even possible to do Android development without Android Studio?

You can build an app from the command line with Gradle: https://developer.android.com/studio/build/building-cmdline

That said, it would be quite difficult to write anything substantial without Android Studio.

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