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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

#181
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 really feels like open source is something else

Open source was like that and was created to be like that. Parts of it still are, but much of it has degenerated into fiefdoms and lots of developers of larger open source projects have been soured by the prospect of just being free labor for surveillance capitalist mega-corps.

The good corners of the OSS world tend to be small communities doing interesting things. It's just like how the small topical subreddits are still okay while the big areas on Reddit are complete trash.

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

#182

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.

> It maybe "great" and mildly "popular" here and there VS Code is not just mildly popular, it's significantly more than twice as popular as any text editor has ever been in the modern era . Source, it's currently used by 74% of programmers ( https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-most-popula... ), the next highest text editor, since the survey started in 2015, was Sublime Text in its prime (2016) at 31%. It…

Ironically the main architect is Eric Gamma from Eclipse fame.

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

#183
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…

> 8-9 diet cokes a day. Holy fuck. That's a lot of caffein (and I'm guessing not good for the teeth)

It's not that much caffeine and it won't do anything to your teeth.

> Agree with him, VSCode is THE IDE.

Nothing in that interview suggests he's ever used VSCode.

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

#184
post #90

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.

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?

«it lists different values that each tool prioritizes, and how "Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them."» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29159433

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

#185
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…

1024×768×16m was my default settings for a long time despite higher resolutions were available - I disliked the need to play with font sizes to have a comfortable layout. With Windows 7 and its awesome scaling feature I finally jumped to 1920*1080. I moved to 4k HDR less than a year ago and had some wow-moments in the process.

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

#186
post #20

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-…

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.

30 IDEs seems like a lot. Could you share why have you switched between so many? Could you list several specific points that make VSCode preferable over emacs.

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

#187
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…

[deleted]

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

#188
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…

He's previously done one of the fairest analyses of the state of functional programming (specifically Haskell) and its pros/cons particularly with respect to building games I've seen as well. It's very refreshing.

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

#189

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 tried VScode twice and despise it. Cold never get it to be much more useful than a text editor with syntax highlighting. Tried setting it up for java and even with fiddling and tweaking it didn't work nearly as well as the default eclipse setup regarding code navigation and maven integration. It felt just like trying to get vim to be modern and useful. Maybe possible, but a lot of effort when there is other solutio…

Java, C++, and C# have best in class IDEs. But for other languages, especially dynamic ones, VS Code is close or better than a dedicated IDE.

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

#190
post #186
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.

30 IDEs seems like a lot. Could you share why have you switched between so many? Could you list several specific points that make VSCode preferable over emacs.

I guess I’ve been programming since I was very young, so I went through a lot of horrible things like frontpage, dreamweaver, notepad++, and then a number of them per language (phpstorm, and other php IDEs, java IDEs, etc.)

The biggest selling point for me for vscode is good defaults (I like vanilla configurations to get started fast on new machines) and discoverability. I want to be able to install 10 plugins and try all of them in a few minutes, and learn shortcuts as I use the plugin (with emacs each extension is an investment)

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