Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A History of IDEs at Google

laurent.le-brun.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 333 posts

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#211

Post by dotwaffle »

achille wrote: post #181
malkia wrote: post #179

Xoogler here (2014-2017). My team (part of Ads) used primarily Java, and we used the Eclipse, then we started switching the IntelliJ. Cider was used also a lot, but I've heard even back then some folks were free to use whatever they like - vi, emacs, you name it.

Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks! I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF MTV on the gBus. Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understan…

> flow-crushing remote desktop latency

Yeah, I was working out of the Sydney office. Almost everything was incredibly slow due to that latency, not just chromoting but also just accessing most sites through beyondcorp.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#212

Post by Scaevolus »

piker wrote: post #75

Man in building Tritium[1] I have always used the analogy that developers would never program in a web-based IDE. Thus, lawyers would never live in a web-based legal IDE either. In exchange for that we’ve paid the onboarding price of trying to get desktop software installed to even run a demo . This is super timely to push us back towards a reality that web may be viable. [1] https://tritium.legal

The main thing holding most people back from web-based IDEs is restricted filesystem and tools integrations, but cloud office suites are extremely popular. Google has excellent infrastructure for distributed build and test cycles built into Cider to go along with the entirely remote version control system.

Best of luck on your web-based demos! Dropping people into a working dummy environment with a few tutorial prompts should really help conversions.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#214

Post by rossjudson »

squirrellous wrote: post #185

Something that amazed me around the time Cider V was first introduced is that some folks have been at Google for so long, they have never used VSCode, and didn’t recognize the UI at all.

100% up-to-date VSCode is still pretty trashy, IMO. It's a mixed bag of plugins without cohesion, no awareness of code other than what that mixed bag attempts to provide (poorly). It is and always has been little more than a progressively more complicated mobius loop of autocompletion-oriented UI experimentation.

Ah, I feel so much better now. ;)

VSCode never made it past the first 10% of what Eclipse did (does). VSCode did succeed at being something for everybody, available everywhere.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#215

Post by seanmcdirmid »

materielle wrote: post #128
cletus wrote: post #40

There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017). When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more complicated. Some still used vim/emacs but a lot of people used Eclipse. Now Eclipse was a real problem at Google because of the source control system. Java IDEs are primarily built to import…

One important piece of context that might make all these stories less confusing for non-googlers: Code references are less important inside Google editors, because we have a code viewer tool inside the web browser. Most people read, explore, follow references, and share permalinks to the view-only tool. It’s a lot better than viewing code in GitHub. It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually t…

This...I noticed a real productivity increase when going from Cider/VSCode to JetBrains/IDEA/IntelliJ for Kotlin code editing. Having a "real" IDE was still a plus, if just for the better code completion.

AI has mostly changed the way I write code, I guess, so I rarely use JetBrains anymore, but a few years ago it was clearly a win to use a real IDE at least for Kotlin programming.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#217

Post by dotwaffle »

rossjudson wrote: post #204
DannyBee wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responsible for getting the investment and (and pushing on turndowns) in getting Google to one IDE, and also worked at IBM for a few years. I also spent lots of time talking with my counterparts in other places. So I know what others spend and were spendingin similar environments in terms of actual dollars, and where it roughly goes. So let me say - it was not a small investment, in part because the all-in cost…

Oh so it's YOUR fault. ;) Don't worry -- I came to love Cider for the simplicity. I tolerate Cider V, but its "anything" nature means it's not good at anything in particular. These days, I mostly use it to peek into what (Antigravity's internal equivalent) does. I was in the Eclipse camp, prior to the IntelliJ reversal. At the time there were at least double the number of active daily users of Eclipse, Google had hir…

As someone who predominantly writes in Go, cider-v was a massive step backwards compared to cider. I eventually moved entirely over to using vim (with the set of internal plugins for blaze etc) which became so much more useful, but I still missed the features of a proper IDE that cider just excelled at.

I imagine a lot of it came from that push to "use outside world tools more rather than writing our own" which is great in theory, but really felt like a huge leap backwards in terms of convergence.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#219

Post by mcoliver »

Andrex wrote: post #92
mcoliver wrote: post #57

Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...

Anyone care to speculate what the internal reasoning is?

It's really baffling. Zero transition plan. I could see them offering something to businesses and not consumers. But the other way around has me scratching my head. I figured out how to get it working again with code assist, a gcp project, some custom json and a bunch of clicks in various places but even with plenty of quota for the Gemini models in gcp, antigravity fairly quickly told me I was out of quota for a week so they also have a tracker for antigravity quota that's separate.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#220

Post by mcoliver »

barbolo wrote: post #82
mcoliver wrote: post #57

Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...

It was a sad surprise last week when we tried to upgrade the workspace AI plan for some of our team members to Ultra and it was gone. We're moving to Claude/Codex.

Yeah I've considered that as well. Was loving having everything in the same ecosystem and have been pleased with the Gemini 3.1 models. I still think this is a blip and Google will come around. It doesn't make any sense.
Post reply on HN