When the main reason for you to use an IDE is to write code, you are missing out the most important part. An IDE helps you to reason about code, to navigate it, to read it, easily.
What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
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Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#42> He’s a really good programmer, but that’s not why his solutions were better.
I disagree, if he was forced to use IDE he would came up with the exact same solutions. People who disregard IDEs generally are good, and thy disregard helpful tools like IDE at least partially due to their arrogance. Also their supposed "simple editors" with various extensions are often very close to IDEs in term of functionality.
Author also seem to used perl for demonstration, which makes me not so certain he benefits from IDE all that much. The key benefits of IDE truly starts to open when you start using typed language. This shows especially clearly when you use python (in PyCharm for example) and start adding type annotation. Is a completly different experience.
You start getting:
- reliable autocomplete (as mentioned)
- reliable refactoring (this is big, because one of the major cry about python is that as it grows it gets hard to maintain)
- showing errors immediately without having to run the code
No matter how good you are all these things make you better.
Note: Above argument doesn't apply to github-copilot (which was used as a demo), it's probably no surprise that using that tool will get someone to arrive with same source code. Especially if it is a tutorial so many people before you typed similar thing as well.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#43All these anti-IDE rants strike me as coming from people who have never actually used an IDE beyond "oh it's an editor with an autocomplete".
They take pride in their masochism
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#44I’ve worked in this industry for 10 years . Without ides it would have taken another 10 years to do the things I’ve done with the help of IDEs
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> getting back into the command line, the terminal, the console & re-learning the hard way how to re-enact many of the things your IDE does for you is really hard. So, if the IDE gives us those tools, what is the exact benefit of "going back and learning the hard way"? > To insist on fast immediate obvious worth is to miss the big picture, is toxic to healthy ecosystems & diversity's neandering How much time do I hav…
> So, if the IDE gives us those tools, what is the exact benefit of "going back and learning the hard way"? Becoming a person of unlimited potential. Being capable of understanding & tackling anything, understanding the world you live in, not living like a marrionette shadow puppet your life. > How much time do I have to spend in the good old hard learning command line to replicate, say, 5% of Intellij Idea's refacto…
"Becoming a person of unlimited potential." that's a very prosaic way of essentially saying nothing.
It all depends on what you want out of the system that you're using, for me personally the programming language, the IDE, the library that I incorporate, are all a means to an end, the goal to bring a unique idea into reality. I value the creation of new ideas more than the implementation itself and thus your suggestion is unsuitable for those of my kind.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#46I'm not sure I buy his argument. I see many programmers who produce inferior code with an IDE and many programmers who produce excellent code with an IDE. I'm in the Java ecosystem, where IDEs are pretty much ubiquitous. But I've used plain editors in the past mostly for other languages. All in all, I don't see the link between using an IDE or not and the quality of the outcome. But I do see the link between using an…
I actually ran up against this exact problem of IDEs being ubiquitous in the JVM ecosystem at a previous job. The company had just released a new SDK to access a data repository. Since it was a brand new library, they only had Java/Scala versions, with plans to support other languages (JS, Python being the next two on their roadmap) in the few quarters. My team, primarily researchers who only knew Python, needed to u…
So full disclosure, I don't tend to write or read documentation that is external to the in-IDE documentation.
But why is documenting the types helpful? The IDE, and for Java/JVM there's a choice of multiple, will tell you. Why waste precious hours of life rewriting what is already documented in the type system?
Sure I'd document the why of something but the idea types should have any form of documentation external to an IDE that can parse the language just seems... redundant.
Whenever I hop over the fence to dynamic languages sure I have to read documentation and large amounts of it is rubbish that could just be inferred from source but that's why I don't hop over there often.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#47I noticed a trend that engineers think all engineering is just like their own job.
The fact is that only few engineers can code in a single language to build the product they are working on.
Sure a kernel device driver dev can write 100k lines of C over a year and memorize every API.
But many product devs have to land code in 4-5 repos & languages. e.g. a bit of python, PHP, c++ & SQL just to complete one use-case.
For those in one language with narrow API dependencies, IDE may seem redundant. But if you are contributing code across multiple stacks & APIs, IDE is a life saver.
Lesson: Engineering is very diverse, and don't assume that tools that work great for you scale to other roles.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#48> He didn’t use a IDE, He didn’t get method name suggestions, code completion, and so on. His solutions were completely different, and they were smaller and faster.
I'm confused by this. I've used pretty much every major IDE and ignoring Github Copilot, I've never had one suggest code for me to write or suggest a method name. I've had them do things like find a typo in a method name , or alert me that I'm calculating a value twice when I could just re-use a variable. Stuff like that. But I don't understand how it could suggest a method name for me.
The only code completion IDEs give me are things that are rigidly fixed by the syntax of the language. If I start writing ' for (var i', it will automatically complete the for loop header and brackets. But it's never actually written code inside the loop.
I guess I've had Rider suggest ways to convert imperative code to LINQ, but that's only after writing the original code.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#49An IDE is a tool developed by developers ot make developing easier.
(They may or may not succeed)
What environment you want to work in is a personal almost intimate choice for a developer and requires trying and failing quit a few times. Through school and work most will be confronted with a variety of flavors.
But when is help/assistance too much help/assistance?
We could all be doing 100% of our programming in Notepad. That is pretty bare bones.
Someone developed vi and many found it made them a lot more productive thanks to the built-in features. (Of which people are still adding).
Emacs can do nearly anything (might be true of VIM, but I am more of an Emacs guy).
Sublime can be very helpful.
IntelliJ is huge and can be immensely helpful in its own way.
I started out before any of the big graphical IDEs we now think of were around. But Emacs was. (and VI). It was also before the net, so you needed books to learn and use as reference.
About 15 years ago I had an assignment at a facility were no internet was available for security reasons. (That is not 100% true but iterating over the finer details would take a lot of text).
It was weird to have stacks of books next to me again. I ended up enjoying it. I had a remember a lot more than
I had become accustomed to and my flow got better.
(Not having the opportunity to dash off to look up a detail really quick on the net).
I did not keep it up after I was assigned elsewhere. A really quick lookup on the net is an addictive thing.
Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?
#50No. IDEs are a tool that makes programming more efficient. If you somehow fail at using that tool it's on you.