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The Return of Fancy Tools

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Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#151

Post by toxik »

akx wrote: post #121
toxik wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used IDEs and stopped. In fact I wish IDEs would work, that’s how I started with QBASIC and later Visual Basic. But as soon as you step out of playground level programming, IDEs are never on their happy path.

You should really probably give Jetbrains' IDEs a try, if you use any of the languages they support. I find it hard to think I'd give PyCharm up for my daily Python and Typescript.

I tried PyCharm for a couple of months. It has some nice features, but they fall apart way too often. A sibling comment mentions Java, and maybe a more statically typed language does work better, but for Python the dynamic nature of the language makes “more primitive” code manipulation tools like PyCharm fail eventually.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#152

Post by snowwrestler »

breakfastduck wrote: post #6

Must admit my comment is spurred by the first few words but my god Dreamweaver was so good in the early 2000's. I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school. Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don't get me started, I'll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...

Dreamweaver templates were the original static site generator. I used them to build a bunch of small sites in the early 2000’s. They worked so well that the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum used them to run its site until 2018:

https://mw19.mwconf.org/glami/smithsonian-national-museum-of...

As recently as a couple years ago I had colleagues still using Dreamweaver to code up email templates (email is the Land Before Time of HTML rendering where tables still rule for layout).

Dreamweaver started at Macromedia too, as did Flash and Cold Fusion. It’s amazing the impact Macromedia had. The founders later went on to start Brightcove, one of the first big white label cloud video providers.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#153

Post by lmeyerov »

This resonates.

Another way to look at it is how we got to simple tools to beginwith: tech-driven industry disruptions. A wave of sw replacement came for tools that are mobile-friendly and support collaboration, like Google docs & spreadsheets, and Figma. Mobile & live collaboration are so important that feature-poor versions of older tools ate giant market share from Microsoft Office, which is 15% of Microsoft's revenue, and the same at Adobe and others.

But Office, Adobe, and friends built up all those features for market-driven competitive reasons. Startups in new spaces get head starts of 2-3 years in consumer, and then maybe a couple more if b2b, but that's it. It doesn't last forever: capital is a moat, and part of that is by building a feature factory, which massive companies like to do. MS and Adobe went SaaS and mobile a few years ago, and they're actively competing here now.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#154

Post by randallsquared »

jruthers wrote: post #72
bitexploder wrote: post #44

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm/IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C/C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and ex…

Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's fine but I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. I'll use the one that integrates with so many of our systems and, though flawed, does a great job.

> I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling.

Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action?

I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to actually plan, and then transfer it a piece at a time into Jira once the initial result is done. Yesterday I was in a planning session with two others, and we did that planning with headings, bullet points, and concurrent editing by all three of us in a Google doc.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#155

Post by refactor_master »

toxik wrote: post #151
akx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really probably give Jetbrains' IDEs a try, if you use any of the languages they support. I find it hard to think I'd give PyCharm up for my daily Python and Typescript.

I tried PyCharm for a couple of months. It has some nice features, but they fall apart way too often. A sibling comment mentions Java, and maybe a more statically typed language does work better, but for Python the dynamic nature of the language makes “more primitive” code manipulation tools like PyCharm fail eventually.

It seems to be the only tool capable enough to at least offer some degree of inline checking and autocomplete. Everything else I’ve tried seems to be perpetually early beta.

Is there a more sophisticated Python tool than PyCharm?

My biggest gripe is the Mypy type-checking which only discovers errors minutes later.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#156

Post by nafey »

jiggawatts wrote: post #129
drawkbox wrote: post #2

Good games should be easy to approach and difficult to master . Good tools should be easy to approach with the ability to customize and do more advanced actions, but never difficult Good tools and products encapsulate complexity but still allow access to it where needed. Good tools aim to simplify complexity, not complexify simplicity. Good engineers and product people make tools that aim to simplify. Make it approac…

"Good tools aim to simplify complexity, not complexify simplicity." Some people don't realise that this is a goal, or that it's even possible. At Microsoft, this was the philosophy behind the .NET Framework standard library. It is simple, beautiful, and abstracts away reams of complex boilerplate that was necessary with C++ programming. Now? I'm using Azure, and... oh... my god. Every internal piece of wiring is expo…

> That's what the Indian subcontractors writing the rest of Azure's code do!

Important to note that the subcontract would be paid 1/10th of what his counterpart in Silicon Valley would be getting.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#157

Post by quickthrower2 »

jcelerier wrote: post #106

> Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, no it was not. people didn't migrate from VS to Sublime, they migrated from notepad++ to Sublime. I have never met anyone who stopped using IDEs once they started, except maybe for VSCode with a few hundred plug-ins to reconstruct an IDE piece-wise (but with much less "integration" between the different plug-ins)

I treat dev tools like real life tools. Just use whatever makes sense, what I’m used to and what’s at hand.

I tried the whole vim thing and no don’t like farting around with things like pathogen and remembering keys. I love a good graphicalIDE too much! I spend most of my time typing or using one of 4 keyboard shortcuts. Mouse is fine for everything else frankly. The mouse is actually a decent invention!

VSCode for web. VS is great for c# projects. I use IntelliJ sometimes and it seems good but don’t use it too much as I don’t Java much.

I don’t think there is a pendulum at all, just a whole bunch of individual coders and teams choosing what makes sense and let’s face it, sometimes, what is hot/cool/hipster

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#159

Post by rkangel »

randallsquared wrote: post #154
jruthers wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's fine but I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. I'll use the one that integrates with so many of our systems and, though flawed, does a great job.

> I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action? I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to a…

> I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira

That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#160

Post by sokoloff »

coldtea wrote: post #144
bitexploder wrote: post #44

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm/IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C/C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and ex…

The post is not about what this or that place or person uses or "always have used". It's well understood that some people have "always used" IDEs, and other people have "always used" Vim/Emacs. The post is about general trends. What kinds of tools were trending/rising at some point, what at another at so on. In that sense, counter-examples don't negate a statistical observation. Only whether the trends described in i…

I agree that anecdotes don’t negate a statistical observation. The original article isn’t a statistical observation though.
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