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Unix as IDE (2012)

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41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#41
post #10

Unix is a DE, no I about it. This isn’t a ding against Unix, the integration provided by IDEs is great for some types of work, but it’s also more hindrance than help for other types of work. Also, the toolset that you get from a typical Unix environment is more or less language agnostic, so you have your tool toolset available to you even when you’re working on something obscure with poor dedicated tooling support. T…

What’s an example of a type of work where an IDE is more of a hindrance?

embedded systems/firmware where the same code may need to be built for multiple HW platforms/cpu architectures.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#42

IMO tmux + a scriptable terminal editor (Vim, Neovim, Emacs, etc) turns Unix into a very nice IDE — but it's pretty dependent on becoming deeply familiar with those two tools: a multiplexer and an editor. I wouldn't say Unix is an IDE, really; but you can build a very nice IDE for yourself using Unix tools, as long as you have a sufficiently configurable terminal multiplexer and a sufficiently configurable terminal e…

I don't know about Macbooks, but if the company-provided Laptop runs Windows, tmux + editor is nowadays very easy using WSL2.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#43
Tangent:

I've been programming for many years, and the old VI vs Emacs inside-marker/debate about which one "real" programmers use has been a constant for the entire duration.

(Because it is only one of those two. Any other is out of the question.)

Anyway, how much of this, quite frankly, non-issue turned important geek status marker is *not* about cargo culting? The programmers back in the day, real or fake, had to use some editor, right? I'm sure they would have been happy to use any editor, as long as it was free.

The programming profession is, in my not so humble opinion, a commodity profession by now.

What I mean by commodity profession: Exactly what you need to know to be a web dev (to take a prominent example) is well-defined since long.

Caring about small things like this just corroborates my point.

I think it is time for all status-chasers (?) aged 20-something to stop caring about ridiculous geek markers such as debating terminal IDEs.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#44
post #40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. How?

I'm sure the answers to that will show that what your parent-comment "demands" is impossible to generalize. We've once done a roundtable at our local developer meetup with this question. There were 20 people there. There were 20 different must-haves, requirements and ideas. We concluded that there's hardly a common denominator that isn't already present in most languages. And that all the other trade-offs in existing…

I strongly agree, and the fact that the poster made no suggestions suggested he had none to make, it just being a nebulous wish for 'better things' . Nothing terrible about that but hardly actionable. Then again, if I was wrong I might've learned something useful from him. Very occasionally you do strike gold.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#45

Tangent: I've been programming for many years, and the old VI vs Emacs inside-marker/debate about which one "real" programmers use has been a constant for the entire duration. (Because it is only one of those two. Any other is out of the question.) Anyway, how much of this, quite frankly, non-issue turned important geek status marker is *not* about cargo culting? The programmers back in the day, real or fake, had to…

> I think it is time for all status-chasers

You're more or less just telling people they should socialize less.

Get back to me once you've convinced people to stop arguing Ford vs. Chevy or Dodgers vs. Giants or Makita vs. Dewalt or....

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#46

IMO tmux + a scriptable terminal editor (Vim, Neovim, Emacs, etc) turns Unix into a very nice IDE — but it's pretty dependent on becoming deeply familiar with those two tools: a multiplexer and an editor. I wouldn't say Unix is an IDE, really; but you can build a very nice IDE for yourself using Unix tools, as long as you have a sufficiently configurable terminal multiplexer and a sufficiently configurable terminal e…

I don't know about Macbooks, but if the company-provided Laptop runs Windows, tmux + editor is nowadays very easy using WSL2.

Works great on Macbooks. Some would say better since copy/paste on a mac, even to and from a terminal in tmux is much less of a mess than on WSL or Linux.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#47
post #10

Unix is a DE, no I about it. This isn’t a ding against Unix, the integration provided by IDEs is great for some types of work, but it’s also more hindrance than help for other types of work. Also, the toolset that you get from a typical Unix environment is more or less language agnostic, so you have your tool toolset available to you even when you’re working on something obscure with poor dedicated tooling support. T…

Yeah, the article very conveniently ignores the "integrated" part of the IDE acronym. Which was one of the maint selling points of them: you don't have to cobble various small pieces of functionalty together by yourself, it's been figured out and done for you by the IDE developers once , now you can just write your programs.

> Yeah, the article very conveniently ignores the "integrated" part of the IDE acronym.

How's that? In unix (mostly) everything is a file, which in turn is just a stream of bytes that you can pass to any unix-y application, the output of which can be passed to any other unix-y application. That may not be your cup of tea or preferred environment, but it's very much integrated.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#48
I agree, UNIX is a great IDE and even more, it is a good documentation system. I believe originally it was used for documentation purposes when it was first designed.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#49

Tangent: I've been programming for many years, and the old VI vs Emacs inside-marker/debate about which one "real" programmers use has been a constant for the entire duration. (Because it is only one of those two. Any other is out of the question.) Anyway, how much of this, quite frankly, non-issue turned important geek status marker is *not* about cargo culting? The programmers back in the day, real or fake, had to…

I can't remember where I heard this, but the idea is that every hobby X is secretly more like four sub-hobbies:

1. People who like to do X

2. People who like to tinker with the stuff around X

3. People who like to talk about doing X

4. People who like to talk about the stuff around X

For X you can substitute biking, cars, whatever, but for this discussion, X is "programming".

1. Some people like to program

2. Some people like to tinker with shells and editors and languages and frameworks

3. Some people like to talk about programming

4. Some people like to talk about the tools of programming

Of course people don't fall neatly into one of these buckets for a given hobby, but we certainly tend towards some subset of them. Your "status-chasers" may just be folks who tend towards bucket #4 when it comes to software stuff.

Re: Unix as IDE (2012)

#50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article very conveniently ignores the "integrated" part of the IDE acronym. Which was one of the maint selling points of them: you don't have to cobble various small pieces of functionalty together by yourself, it's been figured out and done for you by the IDE developers once , now you can just write your programs.

> Yeah, the article very conveniently ignores the "integrated" part of the IDE acronym. How's that? In unix (mostly) everything is a file, which in turn is just a stream of bytes that you can pass to any unix-y application, the output of which can be passed to any other unix-y application. That may not be your cup of tea or preferred environment, but it's very much integrated.

"Easily" integrable perhaps, then.
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