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

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

#41

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-…

VSCode is based on Electron, a glorified hack/resource hog of Chromium than even Github largely abandoned. It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there, but it's built on a foundation of mud. Build native apps that work and are performant. With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it.

This is the most "just use rsync instead of Dropbox" HN-style argument I've ever heard.

It's sufficiently comical to be satire

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

— Brian Kernighan

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

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> pride in

Not really: the linked text shows it is a costly strategy to avoid later «self flagellation»: it is meant to avoid the practice of mindless coding - of overly fast feature insertion, blowing amounts of low quality code to maintain. Torvalds: «I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful».

Also: «I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger ... that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. [...] It's that you have to look at the level _above_ sources. At the meaning of things. Without a debugger, you basically have to go the next step: understand what the program does. Not just that particular line».

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

#44
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone who says a tool is better when it’s shittier is just insane or has a huge ego to protect

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

#45
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…

> he has insane hours and has never burnt out

I think there's two major things you need in order to do that. Work on what you love/want and have no/little need for socializing.

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

#46
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.

Visual studio has been a great IDE from the early 90s when I used it. (Also game/graphics dev)

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

#47

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-…

VSCode is based on Electron, a glorified hack/resource hog of Chromium than even Github largely abandoned. It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there, but it's built on a foundation of mud. Build native apps that work and are performant. With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it.

Mildly "popular"? Which editor is more popular than VSCode?

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

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode is based on Electron, a glorified hack/resource hog of Chromium than even Github largely abandoned. It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there, but it's built on a foundation of mud. Build native apps that work and are performant. With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it.

This is the most "just use rsync instead of Dropbox" HN-style argument I've ever heard. It's sufficiently comical to be satire

Yet I’m seriously considering moving away from Emacs solely because it does not boot instantly. Sure I could set up an Emacs server and all that, but come on: it’s a text editor. It should not take more than 200 milliseconds to boot on a modern machine.

If I care about that, I’ll probably care about Electron using hundreds of megabytes of RAM I shouldn’t even have to buy in the first place. It’s thinking like this that make people say sad things like "16GB of RAM is a bit tight nowadays, maybe you should go up to 32".

(Edit: to people who think buying a bit more RAM is no big deal: remember that our resources are finite, that computers are one of the most polluting industries out there, and the climate clock is ticking.)

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

#49
post #35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s a lecturer at MIT

What does he teach?! He does not seem to have papers on AI and machine learning. Update: As commented below, he does have papers.

Looking at the MIT directory, he's a research scientist and isn't teaching anything this trimester, but has previously taught a few courses on deep learning. He has 78 papers published. He has an office in the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT.

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

#50
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have, and previous to that I was a big fan of Komodo IDE. One weird feature that I love from both VSCode and Komodo is the ability to open a folder as a project, no need for an actual project file or other IDE specific handling of it that older style IDEs always seemed to a require. The feature set of the IntelliJ products are quite excellent of course, but for whatever reason my need for some weird IDE-editor hybrid where the filesystem is what matters, not the project, always meant I bounced off them.
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