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The Return of Fancy Tools

macwright.com

221–224 of 224 posts

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Every internal piece of wiring is exposed, raw, to the end-user. Wear insulating gloves. I'm stealing this one. Hope you don't mind.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#222

> 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've personally gone back and forth over the years between IDEs and decent editors for programming in C, C++, and Java.

I started programming before there were IDEs, so perhaps that has some influence, but you did say "...stopped using IDEs once they started".

I like some functionality of IDEs, but most are barely "nice to have", not "must have" -- the thing I find that I miss the most is language aware navigation.

The thing that keeps bringing me back to just using a reasonably powerful editor (for me, that means either Vim or VSCode, both with zero or very, very few extensions) is the lag between new features coming to existing languages (and new languages emerging) and IDEs supporting them in a non-disruptive manner (never mind fully).

With a decent editor, web or manpage based docs, and a command line based build (which I want anyway for releases and/or CI), I'm all good, thanks.

I mean, if I were to be working someplace that required or depended upon an IDE, I'm not necessarily averse to using one again, but that might be a red flag for me regarding that workplace.

I certainly get the appeal of IDEs, and understand that some find more value in a powerful IDE than in using the latest language features.

Both ways of working are reasonable, depending upon your situation, goals and preferences -- I wish more folks would understand that.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#223
post #91
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bias in HN that favours the simple and clean. But the real world is full of bureaucracies and complications due to legacy and/or politics or some other factors (like momentum). When HN users argue that certain tools (like Jira) is too complex, they imagine that a simpler tool following a simpler process would've worked. For them, may be it would, as a greenfield project, but not for the enterprise currently…

Is this complexity warranted? I mean could not the same goals be achieved by less formality and less complexity?

Conway's Law seems relevant here, but I don't think I've seen (or seen the desire for) it to be used aspirationally, like "we need to become the kind of company that operates with these complex tool systems).

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

I agree with both of the others who replied. Jira has infinite knobs, and they all get turned, and you build this massive, complex system when what you really need is a textbox and some tags. I am not normally a "less features is more" kind of person. But with issue tracking, I am.

Maybe the thing to do is what Slack did with IRC and slap a (better, as the case may be) GUI on rt or Trac.
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