221–230 of 607 posts
1. coders will use every available resource, and 2. there is no limit on resources. The consequences can be left to the reader (re: the article in this thread), but these two postulates are the source of all ills in commodity and open-source software today.
Coders considered harmful.
Surprised there was no mention of brief. That was my favorite editor for programming for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
I don't remember Borland buying it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neovim is my favorite editor and is a brilliant TUI. I think what TUIs get right is that they are optimized for use by the keyboard. I don’t care if they are a pain for devs to write vs OS APIs, they have the best keyboard control so I use them. I despise the mouse due to RSI issues in the past.
Neovim instantly becomes a superior piece of software if you use any of the GUI frontends. If you use neovim inside a terminal you are just straight up using an inferior product, with less features and more problems. The terminal version is most likely slower as well as you now also have the entire legacy terminal overhead. >I think what TUIs get right is that they are optimized for use by the keyboard. Neovim is jus…
(Article is from 2023, so the title should be updated to say "32 years ago", or something) The biggest loss in TUIs is the latest wave of asynchronous frameworks, which bring the joy of dropped keypresses to the terminal. In any TUI released before the year 2000, if you press a key when the system wasn't ready, the key would just wait until the system was ready. Many TUIs today still do this, but increasingly frequen…
When people love an IDE product so much that they can't work without it, they have overspecialised to their detriment. And possibly to the detriment of the code itself. > As for terminal IDEs The GNU/Linux terminal is the killer app . Multiple terminals in a tiling window manager is peak productivity for me. (Browser in a separate virtual workspace.) And modern scaling for a big display is unbeatable for developer er…
> have we advanced much in 30 years?
IDEs have changed a lot, specially with AI-assisted ones. The author kind of acknowledges it, but imho it's a paradigm shift. Not just "a major difference".
> The only major difference that we are starting to see might be AI-assisted coding, but this is a feature mostly provided by a remote service, not even by the installed code!
Then I realized it’s a post from 2023. IDEs have changed a lot since then. Autocompletion has evolved from merely suggesting function names to completing 20 lines of code in the blink of an eye. It's great for productivity, but it also makes you lazy, to the point where you can't live without it.
In my opinion, software engineers should “disable the autopilot” from time to time, just like airline pilots must occasionally land without it. Otherwise, you end up becoming too dependent on it.
Ah, Borland’s IDE! An absolute delight. I’ve yet to find anything modern that matches it. Sure, nostalgia turns everything syrupy, but I actively hunt for excuses to use Free Pascal just to fire up that interface. Okay, fine—I like Pascal too. You caught me. I also use Sam and Acme from Plan 9 (technically from the excellent plan9port), but let’s be honest: those aren’t IDEs. They’re editors. Tools that let me think…
> So many of those classic TUIs adopted WordStar’s sacred keystrokes. What are the WordStar bindings and what do you like about them? I have a general interest in the history of how these patterns emerge and what the benefits of them are relative to each other.
I highly recommend reading this:
I saw this and was like, what? > have we advanced much in 30 years? IDEs have changed a lot, specially with AI-assisted ones. The author kind of acknowledges it, but imho it's a paradigm shift. Not just "a major difference". > The only major difference that we are starting to see might be AI-assisted coding, but this is a feature mostly provided by a remote service, not even by the installed code! Then I realized it’…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go especially, on some platforms they go straight to syscalls and bypass libc entirely. They even bring their own network stack. It's the maximalist plan 9 philosophy in action.
I don't really like Go as a language, but this decision to skip libc and go directly with syscalls is genius. I wish Rust could do the same. More languages should skip libc. Glibc is the main reason Linux software is binary non-portable between distros (of course not the only reason, but most of the problems come from glibc).