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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

#201
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…

On the subject of books, there's an advisory email Carmack wrote to a kid years ago, telling him that his methods may be outdated compared to the modern advances in learning, but when he studied books he would read multiple resources describing the same thing because sometimes one resource may not transmitting information in a way that clicks to him.

I remember how insane it sounded to me that someone as talented as Carmack would look up for a second or a third resource describing a concept just because he couldn't clearly understand it on first try because, contrast to how we react when a student fails to grasp pointers. Our kneejerk reaction to someone not understanding a concept on first try would be "You want to re-read that again? Guess you're not talented. And you keep making mistakes after an hour? Sigh you're a lost case".

And here you have literally Carmack himself not caring how many books he has to reference, because all that it matters is that it will eventually click, he will own it, he will make progress and that's all that matters.

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

#202
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…

On the subject of books, there's an advisory email Carmack wrote to a kid years ago, telling him that his methods may be outdated compared to the modern advances in learning, but when he studied books he would read multiple resources describing the same thing because sometimes one resource may not transmitting information in a way that clicks to him. I remember how insane it sounded to me that someone as talented as…

The talent was realizing his challange and finding a way to deal with it.

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

#203
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 is useful in corporate setting when you have to edit files over ssh on some random machine and you already have terminal open. VS code has remote option but you have to set it up and navigate again etc

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

#204
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 what…

Just for reference, start emacs once, run M-x server-start and set your global git editor to emacsclient -t and you end up with an instant in terminal emacs editor for git, that will also leverage magit when necessary.

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

#205

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.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Maui effort will be able to compete with Electron using a somewhat more native approach. I suspect that it will not.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 what…

Have you tried Magit in Emacs? It's an embedded git client with a very smooth workflow. No need to open and close Emacs just to edit the commit message. Once I got really used to Magit, it's definitely my favorite way to interact with git. Some valuable advice I got about Emacs after switching from Vim is that it's not really a text editor, it's more like an operating system. You shouldn't need to reboot the OS betwe…

Great to about the bg colors

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

#207

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 will be interesting to see if Microsoft's Maui effort will be able to compete with Electron using a somewhat more native approach. I suspect that it will not.

> I suspect that it will not.

I agree. The reason Electron got popular is because front end devs can quickly build a desktop app for use cases where a web app will not work.

And I say that as a web dev who has worked on probably a dozen apps with Electron. Mostly internal tools, but also stuff in production for end users.

For the end user projects we ended up replacing Electron with native apps using the native web view. Each app had a tiny native layer for stuff like downloading files, etc. I don't remember the exact numbers but our macOS app went from +100MB to about 5MB download. Memory usage was also great reduced. The macOS app barely used something like 15MB of RAM IIRC. That was in 2018. Today there are projects that already do this.

I think Maui will rather compete with Flutter and QT, not Electron.

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

#208
post #190
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tr…

Agreed, on approachable defaults for VSCode.

I found use-package, try elisp packages make it easy to try new packages in emacs.

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

https://github.com/larstvei/Try

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

#209
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

VSCode is very, very bare bones compared to what JetBrains can offer in terms of refactoring, debugging, and code analysis (for major languages). It's hard to start at anything specific :)

Not for Rust tho. VSCode+Rust Analyzer offers an amazing experience and I found it to be on-par if not better than IntelliJ/Clion with a much more responsive editing, startup times and task customization.

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

#210
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mildly "popular"? Which editor is more popular than VSCode?

By number of installs, maybe vim :)

If we go by this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

Then it has to be Windows Notepad. Android does not have a default text editor, if it did then I'd agree.

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