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What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

briandfoy.github.io

31–40 of 143 posts

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#31

There's a common argument from craftsmen embedded in here. When something decreases accessibility of something difficult, the people who already know how to do the difficult thing criticize it, because from their eyes, it brings the average quality down. But ease and accessibility always win. This goes for IDEs, programming languages, frameworks, etc. Think of a language like PHP, which made it so easy to code that c…

Rust's Send/Sync made multithreading easier, teaches people to write proper multithreaded code, and results in more reliable programs with less data races and race conditions. Rust's dependency managers makes dependencies easier, teaches people to add dependencies and transitive dependencies, and results in programmers not understanding their own programs.

I think that building tools to teach better programming (eg. teaching memory-safe programming or safe languages, teaching patterns immune to SQL injection or parsing exploits) is a great thing. But given the choice between bad and no code, I feel that it's almost better for people to not complete projects, than to release code with serious functional errors (memory leaks and segfaults and dozens of runtime race conditions that each show up every month or so, requiring herculean effort to debug, or more often go unsolved and haunt users indefinitely) or security defects (eg. https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/wordpress-4.7.2-post-mort...).

It's obviously better to teach good coding than to discourage people doing bad coding, but it's a lot harder (Send/Sync was a non-obvious innovation, and Rust required immense effort to push to 1.0 and build an ecosystem) and I don't think I can do it. And I'm opposed to the principle of trading off your understanding of a program to get more functionality from leaky abstractions (complex languages, optimizing compilers, big library trees, and GPU drivers all leak, whereas out-of-order CPUs and cache hierarchies are a mostly non-leaky abstraction).

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#32

There's a common argument from craftsmen embedded in here. When something decreases accessibility of something difficult, the people who already know how to do the difficult thing criticize it, because from their eyes, it brings the average quality down. But ease and accessibility always win. This goes for IDEs, programming languages, frameworks, etc. Think of a language like PHP, which made it so easy to code that c…

One thing I've learned over 10 years of doing this is how much code is actually required to do anything, having more expressive language is one thing but tools that can help me cram out this stuff are also appreciated.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#33
post #6

> How much effort, in the non-mathematical sense, are you willing to expend to discover if there is a lower minimum? Go over the hill to your left and you discover a minimum that is greater than the one you were just in. Go over the hill to the right and you find a lower minimum. > This happens in just about anything you can imagine, but let’s consider IDEs. You start using an IDE and it makes one particular thing pa…

I have studied computers from the ground up. At one point I could draw out most of the structure of a MIPS CPU. I have worked in Linux for years and think I know the shell very well. But none of that helps me deliver value to my employer. If an IDE or other high level tool can get the low level out of my way and get me more productive I'm much happier for it.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#34
Some schools out there encourage students to do as much as they can with the terminal (at least, for the first semester) and a simple text editor.

The side effect is that there’s no IDE magic behind builds (it’s all plain makefiles and command line tools the students can run on their own). There’s no smart completion, so you have to go out and browse man pages or official documentation.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#35
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

his argument is pretty specific: 8x-------------- He’s a really good programmer, but that’s not why his solutions were better. Since he didn’t have suggestions to guide him, he read the docs and by simply perusing them, was aware of methods and other features that the IDE did not suggest. There were better ways in the libraries they were using that weren’t apparent in the IDE. And that makes sense: in the interface f…

It’s not mutually exclusive though right? For instance, google search has auto complete/recommendation to nearly any query. I use that when helpful and know when to ignore it as well and type in my entire query. (Genuinely curious as I don’t use these IDE features.)

no, not mutually exclusive, but the author had at least one anecdotal datapoint to suggest that people who relied on the IDE did not discover "unusual" functions that were better for the specific task

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#36
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

his argument is pretty specific: 8x-------------- He’s a really good programmer, but that’s not why his solutions were better. Since he didn’t have suggestions to guide him, he read the docs and by simply perusing them, was aware of methods and other features that the IDE did not suggest. There were better ways in the libraries they were using that weren’t apparent in the IDE. And that makes sense: in the interface f…

Is the 8x meant to be scissors? 8 Looks nicer. Never seen it before. Good idea. Gonna use it from now on instead of quotes or > on every line!

Wow you just made me realise why they picked that symbol for usage in git commit messages...

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#37
This seems to be about autocomplete /github co-pilot rather than IDE's which is more of a plugin which I'm sure nearly every editor will get. I actually really like copilot, I've been using it for a while and it often ends up generating a lot of the code I need. It's not perfect, but definitely speeds things up a lot.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#38
> Since he didn’t have suggestions to guide him, he read the docs and by simply perusing them, was aware of methods and other features that the IDE did not suggest.

This post reminded me of the story of Mel.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

So Mel, not only did not use IDEs, he did not use compilers, or even an assembler because they got in his way of deep knowledge of the instruction set of the computer as well as the performance characteristics of the hardware he was programming.

Because of that, he was able to achieve program efficiency in both space and time that others could only dream of.

The "real programmers" don't do X, trope has been going of since before most of the people of this forum were even born.

This is just another manifestation of this trope.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#39
There's a lot here I resonate with. Ironically, I'm sort of headed in the opposite direction—I've been spending more effort experimenting with and working with tooling in VSCode to add autocomplete/docs/type hints/etc. for Ruby projects. My background is essentially IDE-free…for years I programmed Ruby and JavaScript using nothing but BBCode!

I definitely think there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle here, and industry trends are likely headed too far into IDE-plus-AI-all-the-things! territory. Over time, I think we'll come to understand the tradeoffs better.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#40
I feel like this is more of a commentary on dynamic vs statically typed languages under the guise of being about (a poor caricature of) IDEs. Autocomplete for dynamic typed languages has always been a really hard problem, but that’s less than 10% of what an IDE does for you.
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