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Development Environments

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Re: Development Environments

#41

Post by a_imho »

tsujp wrote: post #23
invalidname wrote: post #2

I've been programming since well before we had IDEs... I love them. Proper modern IDEs provide a level of insight and tooling that the anti-IDE crowd just don't get. A couple of decades ago they were problematic. But today's unified toolchains and improvements made them far better. The one semi legitimate problem people have is performance. I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultima…

What happens when you now want to work in say.. Crystal, or Shell, or Rust, or Zig, or any other language for which there is not an IDE (even those also by JetBrains) which is 1:1 feature compatible to IntelliJ? Not all JetBrains IDEs have the same features. Rider (for .NET) only recently got remote editing support which IntelliJ already had for instance. Now you're only as good as your tool (IntelliJ) and you cannot…

I have to admit I'm guilty of this, so much so that I'm tending towards discussing programming language features is moot without discussing the available tooling. In fact, I'm starting to think tooling is (slightly) more important.

Re: Development Environments

#42

Post by [deleted] »

invalidname wrote: post #6
anonymoushn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like Java is in a pretty unique place in terms of the quality of the tools and the frequent need to use complex tools to get even a vague idea what's going on.

True. But Idea Ultimate works surprisingly well with JavaScript and very well with Typescript including react code, etc. It's so much easier than going through NPM noise. Just auto fix and in 95% of the cases it's just what I need. The JetBrains IDEs for other platforms have almost the same level of capabilities. I also worked a lot with xcode, its not nearly as good as AppCode but it's still an improvement over tryi…

[deleted]

Re: Development Environments

#43

Post by annowiki »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #34

Many people seem to think using a commercial proprietary IDE means you somehow forget how to use the CLI or other editors to get the job done. Like they're junk food that makes you dumb. This is as ridiculous as saying an electrician will forget how to correctly wire because their wire cutters are too good. I used to be a build-my-own IDE person via VIM. After using PyCharm and realising an IDE is more than an editor…

I consider myself quite adept at cli, I can sed, grep, find, vim, and git quite well.

However, what I never found convenient in cli was debugging. I was a print debugger for years until my job convinced me to try PyCharm.

I've always thought the reason I never found a suitable debugger in cli was just because I was either too dumb to figure out integrating something like vimspector, or too lazy to get used to gdb/pdb. Ctrl-f on this article has no mention of the word "debug." I think I'm not the only one that never used a debugger before I tried an IDE. I wonder how many people still feel superior in their CLI-Vim/Emacs-only workflow and are just print debugging.

Re: Development Environments

#44

Post by eadmund »

invalidname wrote: post #15
pech0rin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I have used a lot of IDEs in my day but I always go back to emacs. I know its not for everyone but I can still have a running python, ruby, etc process and send bits of code to the process and interactively iterate on ideas smoothly. Also with the advent of language servers jump to definition, large refactoring of symbols, etc are pretty straightforward. The number 1 thing I hate about IDEs and will always h…

A lot of my friends used emacs back at Sun. Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't. Yes a JetBrains IDEs will take longer to build the AST model in RAM but once you have it they do amazing things with it. E.g semantic search and replace, etc. The debugger capabilities are spectacular, they literally show the values of variables on the side of the line you…

> Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't.

Easy extensibility. Read email. Run a calculator. Run Lisp …

Meanwhile, there is literally no feature any IDE has which Emacs cannot do. It's just a simple matter of programming.

Re: Development Environments

#45

Post by timberfox »

My experience is quite different: I feel extremely productive working in the terminal, and what is described in the article as "The frozen world" is for me a virtue of the UNIX philosophy: the structure is not embedded in the data, but the programs can project a structure on it. That allows programs to be filters, and text to be the only format for exchanging information. What the article describes as "The nightmare that is composition iteration" is for me a very pleasant experience: the terminal provides a very fast feedback loop where I can iteratively examine the output of a command and refine the filters I apply. As a result, I am able to prototype commands quickly and accurately.

Re: Development Environments

#46

Post by bandrami »

invalidname wrote: post #33
a-dub wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem i have with ides is that you never know when some boss or it department will stand in the way of your favorite being available. from open source work at home to the most paranoid of high security environments, vim tends to be there pretty reliably.

This is like saying the problem with using my hands is that I never know when my next job will be a football (soccer) player. I get that it's a muscle you need to practice. But limiting yourself to fit a potential restriction makes no sense.

There's something to that argument, though. You probably shouldn't use an IDE when you're learning a language. You should at least understand what it's doing behind the scenes and why.

Re: Development Environments

#47

Post by invalidname »

eadmund wrote: post #44
invalidname wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of my friends used emacs back at Sun. Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't. Yes a JetBrains IDEs will take longer to build the AST model in RAM but once you have it they do amazing things with it. E.g semantic search and replace, etc. The debugger capabilities are spectacular, they literally show the values of variables on the side of the line you…

> Modern IDEs really improved since then and I haven't seen a feature that emacs can do that they can't. Easy extensibility. Read email. Run a calculator. Run Lisp … Meanwhile, there is literally no feature any IDE has which Emacs cannot do. It's just a simple matter of programming.

Everything is "just programming" but deep semantic heuristics from an IDE can't be done reasonably in Emacs. Most of the big features require keeping a full AST model of the project in RAM. That would make emacs/vi really slow.

IDEs are 100% extensible via plugins. Wrote a few of those myself.

Re: Development Environments

#48

Post by invalidname »

bandrami wrote: post #46
invalidname wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying the problem with using my hands is that I never know when my next job will be a football (soccer) player. I get that it's a muscle you need to practice. But limiting yourself to fit a potential restriction makes no sense.

There's something to that argument, though. You probably shouldn't use an IDE when you're learning a language. You should at least understand what it's doing behind the scenes and why.

I think that when you're learning you should take the easy route and the IDE reduces some of the frustration we get when dealing with simple errors.

Re: Development Environments

#49

Post by bmj »

pech0rin wrote: post #12
invalidname wrote: post #2

I've been programming since well before we had IDEs... I love them. Proper modern IDEs provide a level of insight and tooling that the anti-IDE crowd just don't get. A couple of decades ago they were problematic. But today's unified toolchains and improvements made them far better. The one semi legitimate problem people have is performance. I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultima…

I dunno. I have used a lot of IDEs in my day but I always go back to emacs. I know its not for everyone but I can still have a running python, ruby, etc process and send bits of code to the process and interactively iterate on ideas smoothly. Also with the advent of language servers jump to definition, large refactoring of symbols, etc are pretty straightforward. The number 1 thing I hate about IDEs and will always h…

> The number 1 thing I hate about IDEs and will always hate about IDEs is that you open a "workspace" you cannot access all of your files at once. So often I am working with multiple git repos or various things scattered around my computer. In emacs I can simply open the file and have all the syntax highlighting, linting, etc just work. Instead of waiting for 10s for a whole new IDE workspace to open. And then not even have the ability to switch between them easily.

This is a different workflow than the average use of an IDE, particularly for, say, Java or C# development. Personally, if I am working on a web app with a fairly large codebase, I use VS Code, but if I am editing a few scripts or other files, I absolutely use Neovim from the terminal.

Re: Development Environments

#50

Post by tpoacher »

invalidname wrote: post #2

I've been programming since well before we had IDEs... I love them. Proper modern IDEs provide a level of insight and tooling that the anti-IDE crowd just don't get. A couple of decades ago they were problematic. But today's unified toolchains and improvements made them far better. The one semi legitimate problem people have is performance. I run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultima…

I realise I'm probably alone in this, but this "depth of insight" is exactly one of the curses of IDEs for me.

When you write on a terminal, you are encouraged to make good choices so that your code is clean, with a well-thought-out structure and conventions that allow it to be read and processed by a number of tools as painlessly as possible.

When you're on the IDE, your code structure invariably reflects whatever workflow template has been defined for that particular IDE, and good conventions matter less because you can always use live links and stuff to inspect stuff via the IDE.

Of course, you could argue that there's nothing stopping you from following those good practices on your IDE too, or making the extra effort to configure it with good structure and conventions. But in practice, it's a bit like making the extra mental effort to choose salad when there's steamy melty pizza right in front of you every single time. The temptation to take shortcuts and not think your code out properly and just rely on the IDE to dump its defaults is just too great. In the end, when you compare (professional) well-thought out code written in a terminal vs templated code written in an IDE, I feel that the difference in quality is often palpable.

Also, I reject the idea that "tooling" is a concept unique to IDEs (or, in any case, that IDEs should necessarily imply superior "tooling"). Yes they offer the convenience of a suitethat is (hopefully) interoperable by design, but for me arguing that this makes them better tools is a bit like saying the Apple Store has better software than "the internet" and you should therefore only stick to Apple Store stuff.

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