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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

#251
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.

Another master programmer Linus Torvalds seems to have the opposite attitude though

https://lwn.net/2000/0914/a/lt-debugger.php3

Wonder if there's a difference in average attitude between people who do creative stuff (e.g. games) vs people who do infrastructure type stuff (e.g. Linux kernel)

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

#252
post #238
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really refute the point that Carmack made. Namely that a lot of the supposed inherent difficulty in the endeavour of debugging is actually incidental from a general cultural attachment to crap old tooling.

And I believe the point of Kernighan, as well as Torvalds, is that the difficulty of debugging serves as a bulwark against over-complicated code.

So that's why ed(1) is the standard text editor. Anything more usable is a dangerous extravagance! :)

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

#253
post #100

VSCode is definitely the first IDE I've ever felt satisfied with. I still run it with vim keybindings and will often pop up the VSCode terminal to run actual neovim for certain workflows, but it feels smooth switching between the two. Eclipse, IntelliJ, and especially XCode feel so frustratingly slow and confusing in comparison. The tight focus on the developer experience with TypeScript was what won me over. Functio…

For context, I daily-drive neovim and:

> Live preview rendered markdown as you edit

I use a plugin for that.

> Work on Jupyter notebooks and actually run them

I use a "repl plugin" for that, and I actually prefer the experience over Jupyter a lot! (even discounting the vim keymaps).

> Live preview SVG images being edited/generated by code.

Now that is something I didn't even consider. There's probably a plugin for that and I'll look into it lol.

I've never needed to do the rest, but I can imagine how helpful those features would be If I did.

To be clear, setting up even the two plugins above was not easy (in that, I probably spent about 2 hours between the two), so I think this comparison, by itself, actually favors VSCode.

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

#254
post #63

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 somethin…

I really hope that the Debugger Adapter Protocol (DAP) from Microsoft catches fire like the Language Server Protocol (LSP) did, because I think it would do the same thing to debugging that LSP did to language intelligence/refactoring.

Both vim and neovim have DAP client plugins, but many DAP servers/adapters are not well maintained, so the overall experience isn't great.

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

#255
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.

Another master programmer Linus Torvalds seems to have the opposite attitude though https://lwn.net/2000/0914/a/lt-debugger.php3 Wonder if there's a difference in average attitude between people who do creative stuff (e.g. games) vs people who do infrastructure type stuff (e.g. Linux kernel)

Yes, but of the two, which one would you say is happier? Some people like doing it the hard way because they think a bit of suffering is good for you.

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

#256
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.

Not having sugar helps a lot, but drinking Diet Coke means literally drinking diluted acid. Not exactly the healthiest thing for your teeth.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. Yes! There's a post we wrote on precisely this phenomenon with John Carmack as the main character that you might find interesting.[1] TLDR: There was a time when people were willing to spend (literally) tens of thousands of dollars on ultra-premium hardware in order to compute on hardware a few years ahead of the market. For example, J…

>in 1995, Carmack spent $9,995 on one the first 1080p monitors… It provided a 28" screen with 1920x1080 @ 85Hz… Essentially, Carmack was able to trade $9,995 of 1995 money for a monitor that put him decades into the future. “Decades” is a bit hyperbolic. I got a 22” that would do 1920x1440@80 for under $1000 in 1999. I’m also skeptical of that non-4:3 resolution quoted.

I've seen pictures of his desk of what in the '90s we would have called "goofy looking CRT", I'm pretty sure its native aspect ratio was not 4:3.

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

#258
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can speak just like that. Problem is I'm an uninformed idiot. But people who don't know that seem to think I'm pretty smart. *this post does not contain an implication about Carmack. He is actually real smart.

Any uninterrupted and coherent hours long monologue is impressive to me.

You should tell that to my annoyed relative. They may disagree on the coherence front.

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

#259
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to hear more about this. What happened to this guy and the debugger? I’m guessing he got fired and moved to a cabin in the woods. No way talent of that level can exist in a corporate environment too long. Too much jealousy, etc and the higher ups usually can’t stand someone who won’t play by their rules even if the results speak for themselves. Hope I’m wrong.

Quoted post unavailable.

Brilliant reference.

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

#260
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…

I think that a lot of technical books are written from the perspective of already knowing the material or expecting a particular learning path. A lot of important details or framing get left out. The technique of reading multiple sources is very clever because it can fill in these defects - I think I might have subconsciously done this in the past and not fully realized why it worked.
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