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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#21

Post by andrewstuart »

I'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin.

And plugins are inconsistent, buggy, inconsistently documented, hard to use and find and update and goodness knows who developed them. Plugins can be duplicated, outdated, abandoned and incompatible.

But worst of all, a big pile of plugins isn't a consistent integrated product vision.

I gave VSCode a solid go, and I had to keep installing plugin after plugin, but it was truly painful trying to find where in the interface to use the plugin and how to use it.

It reminded me of using VIM as an IDE - not an IDE, a big pile of stuff that isn't integrated. I started using VIM as an IDE when I started programming and I believe it cost me a year of time - I should have gone straight to a consistent integrated IDE.

I prefer a batteries included approach such as the Jetbrains IDE's.

I absolutely do use VS Code - it's always loaded, but I only use it like a simple text editor.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#22

Post by devit »

The articles talks about editors, but VS Code is mainly an IDE.

Its predecessors were in order Emacs + single-language IDEs + proprietary IDEs, then Eclipse and finally IntelliJ IDEA CE.

Emacs lost because it failed to update to reasonable modern conventions and because it used a niche programming language.

Eclipse lost because they released a bunch of different bundles instead of a single install (apparently because the contributing companies saw Eclipse as a common base for their proprietary IDEs), it was slow for the time, and had a bunch of unnecessary UI complexity (e.g. it had an unnecessary perspective system that would change the IDE layout depending on language, meaning that you couldn't just customize the IDE and have it apply for all languages, but had to customize each perspective).

IntelliJ IDEA lost because only the core was open source and major parts were proprietary, resulting in reduced 3rd party confidence.

VS Code is winning because they have a major company backing it that mostly doesn't seek to make proprietary IDEs with it except for minor proprietary aspects, uses the most popular language for extensions, avoids unnecessary UI complexity and is also fast and technically good.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#23

Post by kushalpandya »

koolba wrote: post #9

VS Code is awesome. If you told me ten years ago my daily driver text editor on Linux would be a Microsoft product, well, you’d have been right. Sane defaults. Snappy interface. Universal UI on multiple OSes that doesn’t suck. First class and best in class TypeScript support. It’s going to be hard to beat, now or five years from now.

My only problem with it is performance when you load large repos and occasionally large files because it is an Electron app eventually. I know the extension ecosystem has thrived just because it is Electron but I wish MS worked on a native editor to achieve it.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#24

Post by Kaveren »

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #15

VS Code, the text editor, is a trojan horse. Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions. This is similar to the IBM approach with JAVA last decade(s?). You install a "text editor" for simple things, like code completion. Before you realize you don't even know which compiler you are using or where it came from. You just press F5 and look at convenient break points. And somehow it only runs right on Azure…

> Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions

what are they selling me

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#28

Post by a_t48 »

laksdjfkasljdf wrote: post #15

VS Code, the text editor, is a trojan horse. Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions. This is similar to the IBM approach with JAVA last decade(s?). You install a "text editor" for simple things, like code completion. Before you realize you don't even know which compiler you are using or where it came from. You just press F5 and look at convenient break points. And somehow it only runs right on Azure…

I was already bought into their IDE environment. :) VS Code runs much better than their old offerings.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#29

Post by scottmcdot »

w0m wrote: post #6
paulpauper wrote: post #3

I hate visual studio programs. They are always so slow, buggy, and when they crash, the program vanishes from the task manger but is still are running from the background, so you cannot kill it easily. Visual Studio is a crutch for real coding.

i take it your an Ed guy.

To be honest, when I first heard my colleague say they were using "visual studio code" to develop their Python apps I thought they were repurposing some Microsoft vb.net IDE and hacking it to mesh with Python
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