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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

#81

Post by mrweasel »

labrador wrote: post #6

John Carmack expressed exactly how I feel about having a good debugger. I've never heard anyone say that or comment on that, so it was nice to get confirmation from a master programmer.

Around 15 years ago I worked as a .Net developer, using Visual Studio, and I loved having the debugger available. I might be less clever than others here on HN, but the debugger helped me locate so many stupid mistakes extremely quickly. Sure you could just read the code an reason about the flow and structure and find the bugs that way, but that takes me much longer.

After the .Net jobs I pretty much switched back to Vim, TextMate and other text editors, and frequently forgot that debuggers are available. As Carmack points out, if they are difficult to use, you'll find yourself using them much less. For some reason I've found myself in environments where IDE are seen as second rate. Like training wheels for less skilled developers, but you know what: I want a debugger, I wanted integrated into my code editor and that's good enough for a guy like Carmack, then it's good enough for me.

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

#82

Post by arendtio »

I find it funny that John seems to be such a fan of debuggers.

One of the first projects I worked on, as hobby, was based on the Quake 3 engine (which was one of the projects Carmack worked on). However, especially with real time applications I find the use of debuggers particularly difficult, because there are a lot of bugs that depend on timing and which are therefore hard to catch using debuggers.

Nevertheless, I completely agree, that good tooling is absolutely essential. Even as someone who likes the minimal setups (e.g. tmux+vim), I know that you should ask yourself often, if you are using the right tool for the job.

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

#83

Post by iamflimflam1 »

aborsy wrote: 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.

A semi successful YouTube video with less 2m views can easily bring in several thousand dollars in ad revenue.

He is way more successful and has multiple sponsors.

https://www.atomic14.com/2022/07/27/successful-youtube-video...

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

rvdginste wrote: post #68

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…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by kalleboo »

Kiro wrote: post #69
zo1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?).

I use an IntelliJ IDE and open folders all the time and it's never created any cruft to clean up. I think that only shows up if you start making project configurations (like file watchers to run preprocessors for web languages)

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

#86

Post by pm3003 »

jstx1 wrote: post #5

There's so much interesting stuff in the full interivew - talk programming languages, how software is written in big companies, games and history of games, AI, VR etc. It's always interesting to hear about how Carmack thinks and works. He had some very pragmatic takes too (not liking lisps for large projects, wanting to write more Go if he has the opportunity, nice things to say about JavaScript...) The original HN p…

I only listen to two long podcasts regularly (and the occasional Lex Friedman or JRE, though they’re usually shorter):

- Alles Gesagt from German newspaper Die Zeit (almost half of them are in English). These are interviews that go on until the interviewee says a magic word. They usually do them at the interviewee’s home.

- Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, my favourite on long drives.

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

#87

Post by laumars »

heynowheynow wrote: post #31

Has only a hammer and looking for nails. What takes appreciation is the differences between a DOS game executable and a modern hyperscale backend app server fleet. gdb-server ain't going to solve many problems on 500k boxes.

He’s talking about his field. Clearly gdb isn’t going to cut it for all fields within programming. You wouldn’t use gdb for HTML nor PL/SQL, for example. But these fields have their own debugging tools too. As does working on server fleets.

I don’t really see the need to get snarky about his comments like that.

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

#88

Post by davidatbu »

aborsy wrote: 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.

I remember Lex saying he gets 300K-400K listens per episode, so making a living is surely not a problem because the sponsorships will be priced accordingly.

Also, he's a research scientist at MIT, which I'm also sure means making a living is not a problem.

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

#89

Post by pm3003 »

aborsy wrote: 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.

He gives lectures at MIT, I think.

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

#90

Post by d_tr »

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.

Why should I prefer a strict grid of characters based on technology from more than half a century ago to a GUI for something with the functionality of a tool such as VSCode or Sublime Text?
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