Live data from Hacker News

John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

youtube.com

21–30 of 303 posts

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#21
post #18

I've been trying to listen to the whole thing (it's 5 hours!), and there are some really interesting moments. Albeit, a bit too much talk on old video games that aren't from my generation, but I'm sure this will be interesting to some people to. What I found interesting: * he has insane hours and has never burnt out. He says that if you want to achieve big things in your life, you need to work a lot. He also says tha…

I think Carmack was mostly talking about regular Visual Studio as his IDE of choice, though. Not VSCode.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#22
post #13

I am curious: how does this guy Friedman make a living?! His full time job seems to be running this podcast interviewing people. Every few days he publishes a 2-hour long interview. He distributes ads, I am not sure how much that brings in.

It brings millions of dollars.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#23

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Linus Torvalds likes the fact Kernel debugging is not user friendly so that it does not detract from good programming practice, making sure you really understand your code and what it should do before having to resort to a debugger.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#25
post #2

For e.g. (single process) C++ development on Windows it's probably hard to beat Visual Studio and its debugger. Perhaps he's a little biased in his broad conclusion because this is the kind of work he often does?

Does VSCode have a nearly as good debugger?

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#26

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Linus Torvalds likes the fact Kernel debugging is not user friendly so that it does not detract from good programming practice, making sure you really understand your code and what it should do before having to resort to a debugger. https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65

Yes I also thought about that. Two programming gurus on opposite sides of a spectrum. I find it refreshing.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#27
post #20

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Same here, sort of. I've been using like 30 IDEs throughout my life, and chose emacs over vim during the period I was trying to stay within the terminal, but VSCode is the best IDE I've ever used period.

Have you tried IntelliJ products?

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#28

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Linus Torvalds likes the fact Kernel debugging is not user friendly so that it does not detract from good programming practice, making sure you really understand your code and what it should do before having to resort to a debugger. https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65

That note always struck me as pride in self flagellation. Having been around many talented kernel developers, most are perfectly happy with a debugger or any other tool they can use to debug something.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#29
post #20

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

Same here, sort of. I've been using like 30 IDEs throughout my life, and chose emacs over vim during the period I was trying to stay within the terminal, but VSCode is the best IDE I've ever used period.

Yes me too. I started with basic and then up through Microsoft products, swore off them for emacs for years and am now on vs code cause it works so damn well. That in itself says how well it works.

Re: John Carmack: Best Programming Setup and IDE – Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

#30
post #10

I think his views are understandable in the lights that most games developments targets Windows platform, and text editors with GDB were for a long time not as mature on Windows compared to Linux. His comment on not keeping code in your head also aligns with the fact that most games development prefer object oriented approach to model characters and other entities, and that lends itself less toward reasoning about co…

He’s done plenty of work in FP too. His point wasn’t that good programmers couldn’t work the way you describe but rather “why wouldn’t you want to make programming easier for yourself by using these tools?”

It’s a really pragmatic opinion and shows a real maturity and lack of ego. Something a lot of self-proclaimed “rock star” developers could learn from.

Post reply on HN