41–50 of 343 posts
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
Their main argument is “no telemetry” (or sometimes “no cemetery tracking”…), but VS Code has a setting to disable telemetry [0], and I would trust that it’s really disabled if you set it so (why would they lie about something quite trivial to check with Wireshark or such?) > I’m sure there is a small performance gain because you don’t have telemetry running in the background sending data to Microsoft. Have you profi…
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee and this is my opinion only but I say this because I know what it's like to work on apps used by tens of millions of people and I can tell you that you're dead in the water when you have no idea how people use your product. And no, at this scale, controlled user testing is not sufficient. I've worked on countless Microsoft products over the years from Office through Skype to Teams. I've also been personally adding some telemetry into these but ALWAYS to be data driven when making product decisions such as "which button should we display here", "did we improve latency/stability/discoverability/.." and "which new feature will be actually useful".
Now.. I don't know VS Code 100% but I did see some internal talks, have access to some telemetry (didn't browse it much) and I can say that the team is full of good intentions. They just deal with difficult UX problems. I've also worked at Google and I think it's much different when your product/business is using/selling data about customers as compared to creating tools for developers. You are after a very different type of data in essence and I think the actual privacy is not contended here.
I am sure people will spin this the usual way "big company big bad" and "you never know what they will try to collect next" but in that case, I can only suggest you get a job in one of these companies and see how you will develop anything without real data to back your decisions and assumptions about the real world.
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
1. IDEs that are made primarily for your host operating system by who writes the operating system is basically a loss leader and is there to tie you to the host os
2. Emacs / vi / vim (full disclosure I am an Emacs user) are generally usable out of the box with no modification. Tinkering with your configuration for Emacs is for people who are experienced with Emacs and I primarily do it to make the text editor I want.
3. The actual paid solutions seem to be profitable enough for people to use but for reasons 1 and 2 will have a disadvantage to compete with them.
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
People extend the web-based editor to make it easier to build web applications and share those tools on the web. Using a web-based editor to build web applications is a self-reinforcing, positive loop.
I can see why people who aren't building web apps or aren't using extensions are confused why so many people prefer VSCode.
> I was increasingly getting upset about their extension marketplace, where there is an increased number of extensions starting to sell pro versions of the extensions we used for free. I'm not familiar with any particularly egregious examples, but I don't find "developer wants to sell software" all that outrageous.
It’s a real problem. GitLens[0] comes to mind, which used to be a decent free extension, but now gives me flashbacks to the shareware nag screens of old. I’m also not against selling software on principle. Downgrading a free piece of software into a demo with an auto-update feels shady, however. [0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=eamodio....
(Proprietary is spelled propriety in a few places.) I’m surprised VS Codium is so well packaged..
I wonder if
principle/principal
border/boarder
could have/could of
their/they're
its/it's
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
So I see the appeal of free software (as in liberty and as in beer) - I recently switched a work machine over to pure Debian and it's a breath of fresh air. No proprietary container based installs, no advertising/telemetry built in, and I can choose a desktop environment that I like with some idea that it won't randomly move GUI elements around and change things for the sake of change because some product manager or UX engineer or other needs to make said change to justify their over-inflated salary. LXDE still looked like the LXDE I remember and the same goes for Cinnamon and MATE.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it hard to debug when writing extensions. I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do sincerely tr…
Yup, it’s definitely not a money thing. There’s plenty of tooling I do pay for, but I like hacking on my editor. Sure, you need to go deep sometimes to tune things how you want, but hey, that’s what we do, right? The important point is that people have different priorities and will make different trade offs. For me I like lean, fast and hackable. For others it’s that they don’t want to have to understand or configure…
What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
I think most of us value our freedom more. Most people don't think of it in terms of freedom, but freedom it is. With proprietary software: - You don't know when it will disappear or be discontinued. Even your paid-for existing version stops working when the activation servers go down. - You might be forced into an "upgrade" which breaks something you rely on - That's not to mention issues like being able to fix bugs…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. Yeah, no. Don't get me wrong, Jetbrains IDEs are great. But they're not as easy to extend, its proprietary nature makes it hard to debug when writing extensions. I use neovim primarily, but I've got licenses for a bunch of other editors (Nova, Sublime, used to have IntelliJ). I do sincerely tr…
Yup, it’s definitely not a money thing. There’s plenty of tooling I do pay for, but I like hacking on my editor. Sure, you need to go deep sometimes to tune things how you want, but hey, that’s what we do, right? The important point is that people have different priorities and will make different trade offs. For me I like lean, fast and hackable. For others it’s that they don’t want to have to understand or configure…