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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

#61

Post by koonsolo »

heynowheynow wrote: post #36
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-…

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.

Maybe there is an editor out there for you that was developed in pure machine-code.

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

#62

Post by zo1 »

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

It's all well and fine if all that you see is what will run. These days so many frameworks and layers are below and on top of your code that it's hard to know how your (relatively) simple code will behave at runtime. We've become on some level config and package install warriors.

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

#63

Post by OliverM »

Are there no good UI experiences you can bolt onto gdb? Do Emacs/Vim not have nice modes that take some of the pain away?

I've no real experience with using gdb - my main debugger usage has been on the JVM or using old Borland debuggers on Win32. Are there no good open source user-friendly debuggers out there?

I tend to develop software interactively with a REPL where I can so if a good debugger can give you something akin to that experience I'd be very tempted to jump ship from emacs to VSCode to try it for languages like C/C++.

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

#64

Post by loup-vaillant »

mpeg wrote: post #59
loup-vaillant wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tool…

> I start my code editor maybe once or twice a day

I start my main editor (with the shortcuts I like and all) every time I write (or edit) a commit message. And back when I used Mutt, every time I wrote an email as well. (Now I’m using Thunderbird, but I did like the ability to use my preferred text editor everywhere.)

RAM is cheap at the individual level. But if the entire world needs to go from 16GB to 32GB or whatever, the sheer volume of the resulting electronic waste does not exactly increase my faith in humanity.

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

#65

Post by mpeg »

heynowheynow wrote: post #36
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-…

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.

I agree that electron apps are unnecessarily wasteful but if there’s something important enough to deserve the resources is a code editor.

The underlying problem with Electron is that browsers are also massive resource hogs and I don’t see people switching to elinks anytime soon.

Maybe I’m stuck in a cycle of consumerism - accepting slower software and buying faster hardware - but I value convenience a lot and in the grand scheme of things vscode using up like $5 worth of RAM is not enough to look for alternatives.

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

#66

Post by BbzzbB »

jack_pp wrote: post #51
mongol wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An indie #1 tech and #74 all-included podcast in the US.

The comparison to Rogan is of course wrong, there are levels to this, but that doesn't really make his audience niche as in small despite all the robot comments since the start.

https://chartable.com/podcasts/artificial-intelligence-14342...

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

#67

Post by physicles »

tomxor wrote: post #34
NGRhodes wrote: post #23

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

Don't both perspectives make sense? If you are working on a relatively small or modular codebase for a long period of time Torvalds perspective makes sense, since the codebase will also benefit from that kind of introspection (ok Linux is not exactly small but excluding drivers is on the order of ~100k AFAIK, which is small relative to the time it's been active); id games are on the order of millions of lines of code…

There’s an important reason to keep up these computer-in-your-head skills: you don’t have an interactive debugger in production, or on customer devices. If you can’t reproduce the problem, then all you have is code and (hopefully!) enough logs to figure out what’s going on and make a fix.

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

#68

Post by rvdginste »

In 2000-2006 I implemented garbage collectors in C on Linux. I used Emacs and GDB, and likely also DDD and GDB from within Emacs. I don't think there was anything better back then.

It's been a long time since I used C, but I wonder whether VSCode really gives a better experience than Emacs. Nowadays you can use Emacs with an LSP server, which is likely also what VSCode is doing. And there are Emacs distributions like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs that take away the configuration pain. As someone who has used Emacs for a very long time, I'd be tempted more into looking at CLion from JetBrains instead.

Regarding the comment about the debugging. For me personally, I always take the time to study the code first before I start debugging. A lot of times I already find the problem by just reading the code and even if that is not the case, I have a much better understanding about how the code is supposed to behave and that makes the debugging session a lot more useful.

And I say that because I have the impression that it is common for developers to dive straight into a debugging session without a good understanding of what the code is doing or trying to do. It's like they see the sympton and want to fix the sympton instead of fixing the core cause.

But that might just be my background with garbage collectors: in that case the sympton only becomes visible a long time after the actual problem occurred. The sympton was often dereferencing a pointer that failed, while the problem was the garbage collector writing a wrong value for that pointer in one of the earlier garbage collections. And that led to a lot of assertions in the code to catch problems early on.

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

#69

Post by Kiro »

zo1 wrote: post #60
girvo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds horrible. Just let me open a folder without it being a project or having to use a script to clean up stuff (wtf?).

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

#70

Post by wudangmonk »

nextaccountic wrote: post #25
tpmx wrote: 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?

The killer feature is really just the debugger but having decent debuggers is a Windows only feature. I have no idea why people are mentioning VSCode, it doesn't have a good debugger.
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