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Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

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Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#101

Post by nindalf »

oaiey wrote: post #98
swyx wrote: post #25

one of the most "game of thrones" moves ever is the Julia Liuson promotion for DevDiv. i'm just a rando outsider so I have no context at all (in particular i dont wanna discount Julia's achievements), but just from the outside Nat seemed to be set to run devdiv and potentially be future Microsoft CEO . I respect that that is a very different job than probably what Nat wanted anyway. Just seemed like the rare "tech ex…

With all respect, Nat is not a Satya. And Microsoft is a lot more than just DevDiv.

We didn’t know Satya was a Satya before he took over and accomplished what he did.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#102

Post by nirimda »

015a wrote: post #90
brundolf wrote: post #42

This is a good summary of the playing field, but I think they're way overblowing the panic In summary Microsoft has: - Made an incredibly good web-based code editor which is 100% OSS, no strings attached - Made an extensions repository and a bunch of really high quality first-party extensions that have restricted licenses Sure, in a perfect world the whole thing would be fully OSS. But in the worst-case, where people…

I'm not quite as sure. To me, its kind of like saying "well, we don't have to worry about global warming, oil is awesome and if it gets too bad we always have Mars". Which, I can explain a little bit because that analogy maybe only make sense in my head. I can't think of very many, if any, examples in computing history where a project, open source or not, followed the path of "dominating a domain" -> "sponsor does so…

> I can't think of very many, if any, examples in computing history where a project, open source or not, followed the path of "dominating a domain" -> "sponsor does something crappy" -> "the community rallies around a fork" -> "the fork becomes a dominating force in its domain".

In addition to LibreOffice which you mention, once upon a time the classic example was GCC vs EGCS; the fork was so successful that it became the original thing. It might be harder to consider Firefox an example, since Chrome has taken over, but it was also a fork of Mozilla because Mozilla was too heavy under the weight of Netscape-mandated legacy features. The X.org fork of XFree86 took over because the project behind XFree86 brought in a licence that was not GPL compatible.

In only one of these cases was the sponsor a for-profit company - and it was basically dead - but I think that's because it's a fundamentally recent phenomenon that for-profit companies feel free to release their source code under a free licence. There just hasn't been the time. It takes time to develop a good project, attract a generation of users who take it as the norm, betray trust and motivated people to fork. If the time wasn't there, then they might just pick up what they'd used before or develop something genuinely new.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#103

Post by croes »

skybrian wrote: post #19

I remember when the FSF had dire warnings about using the Sun JDK. I ignored it and kept on using Java, and nothing bad happened. The JDK was eventually GPLed, and by then I decided I didn't like Java anymore and moved on to better languages anyway. I feel kind of the same about VS Code. Binary product? Telemetry? Centralized marketplace? Some plugins are closed source? Eh, whatever. That stuff doesn't get in my way…

The marketplace isn't only centralized but MS VS Code only

>I remember when the FSF had dire warnings about using the Sun JDK. I ignored it and kept on using Java, and nothing bad happened.

Tha't like saying I ignored the warning dosn't invalidate the warning.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#104

Post by agiacalone »

georgia_peach wrote: post #24
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shift + Shift + Command + ESC + Shift + 1 + ~ + Shift + Esc + CTRL + Command + Shift + F1 + \x00 + F3 + ~ Phew! Finally back to my terminal

M-x, C-x, M-Shift-x is emacs, not vim. It's :q in vim. and to suction : because vi pre-dated those paradigms

Or ZZ if you want to save and exit. Saves a whole second!

Also, for those of you who think vim is old, it’s got nothin’ on Ed.

https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#105

Post by philonoist »

nindalf wrote: post #100
philonoist wrote: post #69

Even developers are taken for a ride. Just like WhatsApp and Chrome, it all comes down to ripple effects of "If others didn't use it, I can't". I have given a number of examples of this stubborn sticky monopoly below. Every newbie while learning to code: scared of reviews on internet like "I couldn't get help with this editor online or with colleagues and I can't risk being stuck on this project so I switched to VS C…

> VStudio is best IDE but to with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like telemetry + closed source extensions + Heavy + slow + whatnot!] It’s telling that you needed help from “whatnot” to pad out this list. In what world is “Heavy + slow” a nefarious practice? Even assuming this is true, all of us have written software that was far from perfect. There wasn’t anything nefarious about either s…

>In what world is “Heavy + slow” a nefarious practice?

In M$ world and Apple's world( XCode). 2022's version was the first one to do a 64-bit release and became news titled - "awesome!", "Woah!", "amazing!", etc. [0]

VStudio had nothing unique to it that the Rider din't have, but corporates and developers loved it because they could compensate by throwing some costly hardware and I must point out that it is usually from Intel that M$ is in monopoly in consumer and enterprise market. Apple is just the same, but it gets away being close to the *nix world.

"performance improvements and bug smashes" are just fodder for despair that masquerades as hope, which could have been done away with long ago. Users report them and even showed what exactly could be done down to bits and bytes, but these thigs sleep there for a decade. All you need to do is create a developer account and search "for 10 years" or "since a decade" in their forums. Frustrations pour out and in galore.

"Don't be evil" - Google

"Be devil and also pull your greatest trick" - M$

[0]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2516436/visual-studio-64...

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#106

Post by ghusto »

I was reading [this](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687450) yesterday, and somebody said something to the effect that we should trust Microsoft, because they've turned around on OpenSource. That we should judge them by their "years now" actions, instead of the past.

I tried to formulate a response to this which explained why we couldn't trust them, and it was all a slow-burn ruse, but gave up. This article explains my feelings well though, especially this part:

> Visual Studio Code is a ramp to move the developer tooling ecosystem towards an end-to-end consumable services model of software development tools, and GitHub Codespaces is a white label of an existing service called Visual Studio Online aka Microsoft Dev Box aka Microsoft Azure DevTest Labs

That perfectly explains what I've been feeling is coming. Yes, they're playing "nice" now, but it's only so they're allowed through the door. The old model of "embrace, extend, extinguish" has run dry, so now it's "embrace, extend, subscribe".

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#107

Post by RobotToaster »

brundolf wrote: post #42

This is a good summary of the playing field, but I think they're way overblowing the panic In summary Microsoft has: - Made an incredibly good web-based code editor which is 100% OSS, no strings attached - Made an extensions repository and a bunch of really high quality first-party extensions that have restricted licenses Sure, in a perfect world the whole thing would be fully OSS. But in the worst-case, where people…

With microsoft's history of "embrace, extend, extinguish", I don't think it's possible to overblow it.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#108

Post by nindalf »

philonoist wrote: post #105
nindalf wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VStudio is best IDE but to with a secret tunnel to nefarious practices to use when needed[ like telemetry + closed source extensions + Heavy + slow + whatnot!] It’s telling that you needed help from “whatnot” to pad out this list. In what world is “Heavy + slow” a nefarious practice? Even assuming this is true, all of us have written software that was far from perfect. There wasn’t anything nefarious about either s…

>In what world is “Heavy + slow” a nefarious practice? In M$ world and Apple's world( XCode). 2022's version was the first one to do a 64-bit release and became news titled - "awesome!", "Woah!", "amazing!", etc. [0] VStudio had nothing unique to it that the Rider din't have, but corporates and developers loved it because they could compensate by throwing some costly hardware and I must point out that it is usually f…

> because they could compensate by throwing some costly hardware and I must point out that it is usually from Intel that M$ is in monopoly in consumer and enterprise market.

It’s unclear what you mean by this sentence. Are you saying Microsoft somehow benefits if we buy more Intel? So there’s a developer at Microsoft who wrote in their performance review “yes, I’m proud to say that I worsened the experience for Microsoft users, but it’s ok because that leads to sales for Intel”.

Leaving aside that Intel is playing catch up in the processor market now, do you actually believe this?

Anyone else reading this comment - this is why it’s impossible for me to take these folks seriously. They concoct these conspiracy theories that are only slightly more logical than flat earth.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#109

Post by db48x »

elcritch wrote: post #26
memco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does eMacs have a good remote editing and debugging system comparable to VSC? I’ve tried pycharm and nvim, but both were clunky and did not work as well if at all for remote debugging and editing with navigation, autocomplete, linting etc. VSC does all that with very little manual configuration required.

Emacs has "tramp". It can work pretty well. I'm not sure how well modern language servers work with it.

Editors mostly talk to LSP servers via pipes (usually just stdin/stdout, since the editor starts the lsp server), so running them on the remote server via TRAMP is generally not a problem. In principle should just work automatically, though sometimes in practice it does not.

Re: Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture

#110

Post by jerome-jh »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #6

I had to use VS Code it briefly for a class, and was kind of shocked by the telemetry stuff, and that it's just ignore-accepted by both the students and the instructors. But what turned me off more was this janky feeling around the whole application, something I don't remember experiencing in many other Microsoft tools, such as VB. It feels like it was designed from the code up rather than from the interface down, an…

Could we say that "virality" is reversed with the MIT license compared to the GPL? With the MIT license, additional license agreements can hamper the distribution of the source code or make it useless to the user. Examples: Android AOSP and the Google services, VS code (this article). To the contrary the open-sourced code is still useful to its owner: reputation, occasional free bug-fixes. In the end the MIT license is used by corporations to gain market-shares and sell proprietary SW, hence the reversed virality.
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