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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

#151

Post by Asooka »

Barrin92 wrote: post #16

I'm one of the people he talks about who moved from diehard Emacs use slowly to more and more VSCode use largely due to the better UI experience around debugging and integration of a lot of modern tools. His point about features not being used when they're complicated to reach despite people claiming that they'll use them is a true observation in particular. You always can set up a lot of those features in your unix-…

I've used IDEs, but just keep ending up using vim. With fzf, ctags, clangd and YouCompleteMe, it's a very productive tool for C++. The two things I really miss from Visual Studio are the easy project setup - writing cmake by hand isn't very fun and debugging why it isn't generating what you want is a pain ; and the great visual debugger - nothing I have tried on Linux is as comfortable as GDB's TUI, which isn't very comfortable to begin with, though the capabilities unlocked by the python bindings are unmatched. I've used GDB's python features to great effect to continually monitor the program and stop when it reaches the invalid state I'm interested in, while logging back traces of interesting points.

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

#152

Post by ctvo »

bregma wrote: post #145
koonsolo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up with the best of both worlds (subjective of course!). I use VSCode with a Vim plugin. I get all the best keystrokes from Vim, and the GUI of VSCode. For me, going to Vim would be worse, and going to plain VSCode would be worse.

VS Code with a vim plugin is in the uncanny valley of text editors. It doesn't work quite right and a lot of functionality is missing. It's enough that there's more frustration and less productivity for no advantage.

The majority of my movements are moving around files and making minor edits that the vim plugin supports well. It saves me from reaching for the mouse in many case, and that's the entire goal for me.

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

#153

Post by epolanski »

agumonkey wrote: post #135
zmmmmm wrote: post #11

Such a joy to listen to Carmack talk about just about anything. Not sure if it's an age thing but there is a particular feeling common to contemporaries of that era, growing up in our formative years as computers grew from their humble beginnings to the incredible machines we have now. At that time, each new improvement brought astounding differences in capability. In the space of 10 years we went from 8k to 64k of m…

Era aside, Carmack is a special guy, he can talk articulately and gently for hours. He did a talk few years ago (quakecon ? .. I forgot), basically a 3h long monologue about thinking while coding, there was only a single 5min pause to sip some water, incredible.

His expertise over a very wide array of objects is also extremely impressive.

I know spectroscopy very well, and yet hearing him talk about light-matter interaction was still very educative for me at the time and I was impressed by the depth and sheer knowledge he had on the matter, learned many things I didn't even know existed from him.

Same applies to many other topics related to physics, engineering and mechanics, not just computer science and programming.

Whoever says that you need a degree to get depth in several topics has never knew people like Carmack who simply study and try to understand.

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

#155

Post by tpmx »

imron wrote: post #101
pm3003 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, he meant VS. He even mentioned using an older version (6) as it is much faster on modern computers. Maybe he was referring to a friend of his, I don’t remember. Most Windows programmers I know (not a lot) use VS for the ease of integration with all things .NET and Microsoft.

VS6 was such a great product.

I tried out VS 2019 last year on a whim. The last time I used VS before that was in the early 2000s (probably 6.0).

It was a surprisingly bad experience - weirdly slow even on a high performance PC and so much clutter by default.

Tried out VS 2022 just now. First impressions are better.

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

#156

Post by bryanlarsen »

matwood wrote: post #134
baby wrote: 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…

Did he define 'work' during the podcast? Since he also mentions reading CS books, perhaps he isn't defining work as literally typing at the computer, but instead always improving. Think of what people could do if they took part of the 3 hours of TV watched per day and instead read a book. He's also a high level grappler (nerd worlds collide if I ever had a chance to roll with Carmack :) ), which is not an easy feat.

He does talk about always being able to work on something interesting. Working on a different aspects of a project to keep motivated. And that definitely includes research.

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

#157

Post by bryanlarsen »

balfirevic wrote: post #147
jillesvangurp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point he made was rather the opposite. He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week. He needs seven to eight hours of sleep, like a normal person. He specifically mentioned that he never was much into doing all-nighters and that he experimented with working different times of the day. So he'd start in the afternoon and then continue until deep in the night when he was younger whereas having…

> He works 10-12 hours a day, 60 hours a week, 6 days a week > Work life balance and taking care of his family is just part of that deal as well. I don't judge anyone for how they like to spend their time (and certainly admire Carmack), but what work/life balance? There isn't much except work there.

100 hours a week is no life.

If you can eliminate the average 90 minutes a day commuting Americans do, along with the average 20 hours a week spent cooking and cleaning et cetera by hiring people to do that for you, a rich person can have more life working 60 hours a week than a poor person has working 40.

Carmack is a high level martial artist. That would have required a significant time commitment.

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

#158

Post by koonsolo »

bregma wrote: post #145
koonsolo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up with the best of both worlds (subjective of course!). I use VSCode with a Vim plugin. I get all the best keystrokes from Vim, and the GUI of VSCode. For me, going to Vim would be worse, and going to plain VSCode would be worse.

VS Code with a vim plugin is in the uncanny valley of text editors. It doesn't work quite right and a lot of functionality is missing. It's enough that there's more frustration and less productivity for no advantage.

Works fine for me. Can you give an example?

One thing I have issues with is autocomplete and using . to repeat the last edit (which includes the autocomplete). Other than that, all fine.

Edit: all the vim commands give me a huge advantage on productivity when editing. All the GUI with plugins gives me a huge advantage on project navigation. Would love to see anyone do better using either one or the other.

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

#159

Post by cryo »

TT-392 wrote: post #94

I can't be the only one who likes the commandline gdb experience right?

Up until rencently I didn't like gdb much, but this was mainly for one thing I got wrong all the time: Make a code change, recompile, restart gdb and start again debugging.

Then I learned: you never need to stop gdb! Just enter "r" and it will restart the program with the fresh changes leaving all breakpoints and setup intact.

Game changer to me.

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

#160

Post by ahartmetz »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #108
huntoa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that much caffeine, his 3 liters of coke contains about the same as 1 liter of brewed coffee. 1 standard can of diet coke (375 ml) contains 48 mg caffeine -> 128 mg/liter. So 3 liters (8 cans) contains 384 mg caffeine. Brewed coffee contains ~400 mg/liter.

I feel like one litre of brewed coffee is a lot of caffeine!

It is! I drink one 300ml mug of strong coffee (or two of thin coffee) a day and that feels like enough for sure.
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