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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

#121

Another clip from the same interview on the "best" programming language => https://youtu.be/RfWGJS7rckk

Honestly the full five hour interview is gold. And Lex is a great interviewer since he can keep up with him.

It is great. I'm hoping he does a part 2, this Tweet from him suggests it'll happen: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1555240951911686144... (me reading between the lines!!).

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

#123
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like Brian has never used a good debugger

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

#124

Vim mode on VScode is pretty easy. Msft nailed VScode by making it an easy electron app that gets up and running . An improved sublime.

When I tried vim mode on VSCode it seemed to have extremely few vim features. So it's basically more to get the vim keys. That was one of several reasons why I didn't like VSCode.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

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

#126
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?

Yeah, half of my coworkers used to be on CLion (for Rust). TBH I couldn't get past the fact that it reminds me of Java IDEs with too many things going on. What's better compared to VSCode?

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

#127
post #52
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.

I think I would probably die if I drank 1 liter of coffee

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

#128
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 la…

There really is a learning curve to using these tools, and the investment might not be worth it. I use GDB so unfrequently that I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something. Coupled with the fact that it's not integrated with the language (I can't run `cargo debug` or `cargo gdb` or something) and not the default on Mac (why should I relearn lldb), I end up just printing stuff instead of using it.

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

#129

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 have a similar experience, I started to use Emacs with my first Linux installation way back in the late 90s together with pico (later nano for fast editing). A few years ago i came to know about sublime text and I was astonished how much can be done with it and how quick it was compared to Emacs. Sure it does not contain all the goodies Emacs has but i after getting sublime text i realized how much time i saved and focusing on code. Recently i stop bothering and moved to VSCODE and its pretty damn good.

I miss sometimes Emacs but i prefer to use VSCODE nowadays as its a much modern environment and brings me directly to the point of comfort. I also tried Neovim but i was not convinced to replace VSCODE, i mostly use it on the console for quick and dirty editing.

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

#130
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having…

> That sounds like an intense schedule for sure but not really that insane

I'm not sure what disqualifies that as insane, but it pretty much precludes any social life. I'm on-and-off doing these kind of hours (sometimes work takes over life, sometimes life takes over work), but when I do these kind of hours even when I'm not working my brain is still thinking about work. I can't imagine doing this for decades at a time, this is truly a life dedicated to work. But I agree that you can't achieve great things without sacrificing your life.

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