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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

#51

Post by jack_pp »

mongol wrote: post #33
jackblemming wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way Joe Rogan does, just on a smaller scale. 1/100th of what Joe Rogan makes is still an extremely comfortable life.

Lex seems to be on a trajectory to really make it big. It is amazing what kind of guests he is having. Perhaps if he turns it more mainstream he will become the next Rogan?

He doesn't have the personality necessary to be mainstream like Rogan. Rogan is to podcasts what pop singers are to music. Lex is like a fledgeling indie band, he will carve his niche but that's pretty much it. Mainstream audiences by definition don't have the intellect or curiosity for 90% of his content

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

#52

Post by huntoa »

baby wrote: 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…

It's not that much caffeine, his 3 liters of coke contains about the same as 1 liter of brewed coffee.

1 standard can of diet coke (375 ml) contains 48 mg caffeine -> 128 mg/liter. So 3 liters (8 cans) contains 384 mg caffeine. Brewed coffee contains ~400 mg/liter.

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

#53

Post by koonsolo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

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-…

I ended up with the best of both worlds (subjective of course!).

I use VSCode with a Vim plugin. I get all the best keystrokes from Vim, and the GUI of VSCode.

For me, going to Vim would be worse, and going to plain VSCode would be worse.

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

#54

Post by jillesvangurp »

baby wrote: 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 listened to the first two hours on a train yesterday. I'll likely finish it later.

The discussion about tools and languages was particularly interesting. You might expect John Carmack to be pretty old school and dogmatic on using e.g. C and instead it seems he has a very broad taste and experience with different languages and tools. Just a very pragmatic person that switches between doing C, python, Go and other languages. For someone that is into hyper efficient graphics code, admitting that for the vast majority of code, using a garbage collector is perfectly fine is IMHO a very pragmatic and mature attitude. He doesn't have to prove anything to anyone anymore on that front of course.

VS Code is indeed a very popular IDE. The Jetbrains ecosystem is also pretty interesting. I found his comments on debuggers to be pretty striking. GDB is so hard to use that programmers avoid using it. Having a proper debugging UI changes that. He was talking about how he just runs most things in the debugger by default to see if things work as he expects.

In the same way having static code analyzers tell you that, no, actually your code wasn't perfect and is full of little time-bombs that could go off at any moment is a great argument against just pretending you are Buddhist monk that only requires a pen and paper to produce perfect code. Exaggerating here of course but I know some people and that on purpose avoid using, or even learning about tools that would allow them to be more productive and better engineers.

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

#55

Post by koonsolo »

NGRhodes wrote: post #23
Barrin92 wrote: post #16

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, he also worked his entire life on his own codebase. Reality for most programmers is not like that.

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

#56

Post by loup-vaillant »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #15
zmmmmm wrote: post #11

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything. Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of m…

One generation removed from that, folks got their start programming on the web. Some similarly developed great understanding about the internals of web browsers and how to get the most out of them. I don't think that's less beautiful :) Each generation will forge deep appreciation for stuff higher on the stack. And there will always be folks working at the embedded boundary, forging deep appreciation for the folks wh…

Current stacks are much bigger and much more opaque than the 90’s hardware was. On top of that computers are fast enough that the need to go lower lever is significantly lessened. Because of this, it is likely a much smaller proportion of current programmers will get to learn about low level stuff, despite the much greater availability of learning material.

Cutting corners is not the only reason why software slows down as hardware speeds up. Many people just have no idea how fast their computer is supposed to run, and their "fast enough" is often much slower than it could be. And in some cases that’s the difference between "fast enough to make a smooth animation", and "slow enough that I need a spinning wheel".

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

#57

Post by pizza234 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #48
marmada wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I've done some tests some time ago, and Sublime Text, which is a native app, also takes a lot of memory. Plugins also do take lots of memory.

JetBrain's IDEs are extremely slow and memory intensive - well beyond VSC and ST - and yet, complaints are always directed at VSC.

I like to be able to edit new text files instantly, and the simple, pragmatic solution, is to keep an editor always open in the background.

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

#58

Post by inglor_cz »

NGRhodes wrote: post #23
Barrin92 wrote: post #16

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

Nokia's Symbian OS was notoriously hard to debug, too. Half-baked emulators and the real device debugging was even worse.

I wonder to what degree this contributed to the eventual downfall of the platform. The learning curve was so steep and the IDE and tools placed so many mines under your feet so relentlessly that it must have driven some talent away.

(An example: you closed the emulator and it left over some running background processes that you had to fish out and kill in the Windows process manager. If you forgot to do that, you could restart the emulator, but breakpoints would stop working. But if you mistakenly killed another important background process, the restarted emulator would freeze and you had to restart the entire Windows.)

On the contrary, I just love working with JetBrains IDEs. The debugging functionality is so great that I feel no one is trying (deliberately or out of neglect) to waste my time. Given that I am 15 years older than I was in the Nokia days, time has become a more valuable resource for me.

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

#59

Post by mpeg »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #48
marmada wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I understand your point, but I can’t say I relate at all.

I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day, so the launch speed does not even register

RAM and computers in general are so cheap that I just max out every laptop configuration I buy. If you’re a programmer and will use a machine for work spending $3-4k every couple years should not be a problem, we’re paid very well and should therefore use the best tools we can find.

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

#60

Post by zo1 »

girvo wrote: post #50
wiseowise wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hybr…

I regularly open folders as projects and the intellij (pycharm in my case) IDE creates it as a project without hassle. Just add a bit of a script to cleanup any ide project cruft it creates and I'd say you're mostly there. Compared to all I get from a real ide, VSCode is like a stone age dinosaur.
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