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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#321

Post by dfee »

willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

I’m going to save this comment for many years down the line. I don’t agree with your sentiment (having also used VIM and Rider, but happy right now with VSCode), so it’s a sort of personal check-in I can have with my thoughts sometime near 2030.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#322

Post by enjoylife »

kamhh94 wrote: post #171
vixit wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, if IntelliJ gets remote functionality I'll be very happy.

I spoke to the team in KubeCon last year and they said “our research team is looking into it” with a hand wave. I doubt IntelliJ will actually implement this anytime soon, sadly.

I agree and not saying they would get to it, but considering that was pre-COVID, I would imagine/hope they might reprioritize.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#323

Post by jolux »

derefr wrote: post #297
lmm wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if there was a hammer that was so badly-balanced that—despite being not too hard to lift—you needed to be wearing a powered exoskeleton to accurately hold and swing it. That'd be a bad hammer, right? Hammers are hand-tools; it's an expectation that they'll work when used "manually", i.e. with raw human capability alone. I remember people making similar arguments when cars started to have power steering. > P…

> and expecting them to be skeuomorphic to a particular approach may hold us back Whatever a programming language is, it has to be something you can hold onto in your head, because the human mind is where "programming" takes place. And there really aren't many forms that such a thing can take. The step-sibling of programming languages, the mathematical proof, can really take any form we like; we're not limited to mat…

If you're suggesting we all switch to writing APL then I'm probably in agreement with you :) but I still think you're partially undervaluing and partially misunderstanding the full potential of IDEs.

>Can you think in terms of what a JetBrains codebase will look like after you refactor it, without actually doing the refactoring and seeing the result? How about with two or three such applications in play?

Not sure what you mean here, IDE built-in refactorings are tools that I use because I know exactly what I want to do and what the codebase should look like after I do it, but the work to get there is tedious and repetitive. I have never had trouble imagining how they work or what the result will be. Compilers do optimizations that alter the structure of programs reliably; an IDE with a language model as rich as the IntelliJ suite's is little different from a compiler specialized to a few high-level optimizations.

>Programming languages and (symbolic) mathematics are both formal languages. You manipulate them algebraically, by moving the symbols around, applying transformations that turn one valid statement into another valid statement.

We seem to think about programming languages very similarly. Always nice to find a fellow traveler ;)

I'm not really a fan of Java though I will confess to liking C# a lot. My heart is with OCaml and Idris though. So why do I program in C#? Why do I choose such a "high-friction" language, as you put it? C# is most definitely not designed from the ground up for maximum developer ergonomics.

It's because of the ecosystem, and specifically tooling like the JetBrains IDEs. I'm more productive in a language like C# because of the depth of high-quality libraries available to me and the quality of the tooling I use. Yes, some of the worth of an IDE is in papering over ergonomic problems in languages. However, IDEs are certainly not required to write code in these verbose languages. I use them because they are powerful tools that are well adapted to the conceptual model of the languages they support, and they enhance my ability to use patterns and write code "fluidly" as you put it.

Even in more ergonomic and expressive languages this has value, probably even more than it has in C# or Java. These languages are easier to write without an IDE, but we don't know what we're missing because the high-quality tooling just doesn't exist. Idris' Atom support is a pointer in the direction I'm thinking of: https://atom.io/packages/language-idris

Just think about what an IntelliJ-level IDE could do for a language with a type system as rich as Idris'. You might be able to infer entire applications based off a handful of expressive type signatures. We have yet to see what writing in one of these languages is like with a suitably powerful design environment, and I fully believe that it will make writing them with a text editor look pedestrian just like IntelliJ did to Java.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#324

Post by willcipriano »

Igelau wrote: post #288
jameslk wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to use Intellij for everything (and I'm not even a Java dev). It is indeed very nice and comes with so much out-of-box around languages and popular libraries. However, Intellij is _sooo_ very slow to load and edit with. This is more tolerable if you work on one project. But in the past couple years, I've had to work on many smaller projects, and loading up Intellij for multiple projects meant gigs of RAM disap…

You just have to get Nyan Progress Bar extension to make those wait times more fabulous.

Seconded. The Dilbert plugin can also make the wait times more tolerable.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#325

Post by karmasimida »

willbw wrote: post #198

I find this post along with the comments in "A Picture of Java in 2020" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551390 to be incongruous with my experience as a professional developer. My first couple of years writing software I used Vim, then VSCode, then worked in a Java shop and was forced to use IntelliJ. I didn't like it at first, but now after a couple of years I cannot see how I lived without it. The idea that…

Yep.

Not seeing myself switch to VSCode anytime soon from IntelliJ or Pycharm.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#326

Post by jen20 »

orange8 wrote: post #157
est31 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they are referring to the Microsoft provided plugins which are proprietary and their license denies usage with any VS code fork. Personally I've never felt the need to use them, but admittedly, I barely use VS code at all.

If I've never heard of those plugins, they cannot be that critical or even interesting.

Live Share is probably _the most_ interesting feature of the entire editor, and is not open source or usable with VSCodium. See [1] for further links.

[1]: https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#327

Post by jolux »

rfw300 wrote: post #227
grishka wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are JetBrains IDEs for those too — CLion, Rider and AppCode respectively. No IDEA how well they work though.

Can’t speak to CLion and AppCode, but Rider is spectacular. It integrates all of Resharper’s (JetBrains’ C# code analysis tool) features with the IntelliJ core that run circles around the bloated, buggy mess that is modern Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code).

Love Rider. ReSharper makes Visual Studio unacceptably slow though. It's already borderline without RS but adding it makes it totally suck, for me at least.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#328

Post by gruez »

orange8 wrote: post #151
gruez wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a fan of VS Code because everything is a plugin. Replace "vs code" with "javascript" and "plugin" with "library" and you've just described the javascript ecosystem.

Isn't that the very definition of a programming language eco-system? Or is the point you are making being you do not like eco-systems?

As opposed to something like python, which is "batteries included".

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#329

Post by fmakunbound »

I'm glad you enjoy VS Code, but we'll have to see about longevity. I started my investment in Emacs about 25 years ago when it'd already been around 10 years before that (GNU Emacs), and it's still paying off plenty for me.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#330

Post by sk5t »

sethammons wrote: post #272
dheera wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way people use Java is a problem. Spin a blank "hello world" project in Android Studio and you get no less than 79 files, and it won't work the next time you update Android Studio because of some Gradle errors. I don't know what went wrong, but "hello world" should not be 79 files, it should be something that I can hand-code in something less than an IDE.

Heh. Some years ago, I thought I’d step away from highly available distributed systems and build an android app. Got to the point in the tutorial where we needed to define a string for “hello, world” and the tutorial said, “ok, navigate to such and such directory and add this xml file and ...”. Closed the tutorial assuming Java is not for me.

This sad outcome is 100% not Java's fault.
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