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The Era of Visual Studio Code

blog.robenkleene.com

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Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#451

Post by nl »

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…

> 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? It gets pretty hard, no?

I don't know what kind of refactoring you are doing but for me yes I absolutely know what it will look like after the refactoring. In fact, that is usually why I'm doing it: refactoring to remove complication.

For example, the typical "extract method" refactoring lets me grab a piece of code that is almost duplicated elsewhere and turn it into a method with conditional logic to handle both conditions. That's a great simplification and make it much easier to hold in my head.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#452

Post by square_usual »

jopsen wrote: post #191
laqq3 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sublime is great but it updates once every other blue moon for a reason. I like both editors (VSCode and Sublime) and just want to point out that Sublime Text 4 is in semi-public alpha. It is "semi-public" in the sense that the download link is given in the Discord channel, but anybody could join it. For nine months or so, there has been a new release of ST4 every 2-3 weeks. Development is definitely ongoing (thoug…

I was a huge sublime fan, but it seems like the plugin eco-system moved on. At the end of the day, I go where the plugins are.

(Not a sublime fanboy or anything, just curious) What kind of plugins do you use that aren't on sublime? I was reluctant earlier for the same reason, but after I installed sublime-lsp I didn't think I needed much more.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#453

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

aschatten wrote: post #291
varispeed wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it as knowledge is scattered in many places and not always up to date. Then it still likes to stall from time to time or sometimes doesn't register key presses properly. It's a poor user experience, but even worse is that alternatives are often worse. I wish there was an e…

(disclaimer: I am an IntelliJ fanboy) > From my experience out of the box you get poor performance and you have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to change configuration to improve it as knowledge is scattered in many places and not always up to date. I don't know if you are talking about IntelliJ or VCS, but IntelliJ can quickly start an empty project. And you don't to spend time to figure out how things work.…

I know this is how a lot of people think of the text editor/IDE divide, but it’s just not true anymore: for specific languages like Clojure or Common Lisp, emacs has plugins that provide all the essential features of an IDE with minimal fuss. For JavaScript, VSCode or tide-mode for emacs have, in my experience, significantly better code intelligence than WebStorm. The only languages IntelliJ is better at than the competition, IME, are Java, Kotlin and Scala: and, even in these cases, the LSP tooling is catching up fast.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#454

Post by daxvena »

Honestly, the tools developed out of VSCode have made my Emacs environment so much more powerful, and so much easier to set up for new languages.

With the language server protocol & debug adapter protocol, I can just plugin in a couple of servers and have a full-blown IDE environment that uses a consistent interface across multiple languages. I remember spending so much time trying out and setting up ctags, ggtags, irony, rtags, gdb-mi, etc...

I don't see myself switching to VSCode because I can just take the best features from VSCode and use them Emacs.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#455

Post by dfinninger »

jdrobertso wrote: post #396
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JetBrains IDEs are development environments, meant for editing code, in specific primary language. I've used RubyMine and IntelliJ. IntelliJ kept me sane for the thankfully-short time I worked with Java, and I appreciate it. But I can't get past how SLOW RubyMine is. Even on my $4,000 MBP, it just feels sluggish. Maybe that's because I'm at home on Rails, and I can think faster than the IDE, but there's really not…

How are you guys all working in one language? I work on a stack that has ruby on rails on the backend, javascript on the frontend, .NET Core apps to do data transformation, and some NodeJS thrown in there, too. I have to switch back and forth between these projects regularly. There is no other tool like VS Code that provides me the flexibility to have snippets and highlighting and the things I need to maintain these…

Huh, I feel the same way about IntelliJ.

Java, Python, Go, Terraform, Bazel, all in the same IDE at once. Best in class refactoring for all of them. Handles the monorepo surprisingly well (Bazel is a big help here, too).

I had to bump the memory a bit on the IDE, but after hundreds of thousands of lines of code the index gets large.

I used to use VSCode heavily... Emacs before that. But now with IntelliJ I don’t really need much else. The plug-in ecosystem is really nice too.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#456

Post by toastercat »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #303
munificent wrote: post #162

I like the enthusiasm, but this article is a little too breathless to be fully believed. > The most important thing I look for when choosing which tools to use is longevity. In my time, I've programmed using Director, Microsoft QuickBASIC, FutureBASIC, THINK C, CodeWarrior, BBEdit, TextMate, Visual C++, Visual Studio, Sublime Text, Eclipse, Atom, VS Code, IntelliJ, XCode, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. I d…

I've given VSC several months. I just went back to ST3. I find it refreshingly clean.

I'm in a similar boat, except I used VSCode for two years before switching back to Sublime Text. I remember watching [this funfunfunction video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIjKJjzRX_E) and thinking how much I related to what he says about becoming addicted to tooling. This was me with VSCode; I was spending a large amount of my work time tweaking it, adding plugins, tweaking plugins, troubleshooting plugins, removing plugins, looking for new plugins, etc.

However, the main kicker that made me switch back to Sublime was that I started it up one day and was astounded by how much snappier and responsive it was compared to my plugin-ridden VSCode. Admittedly, I do miss a lot of the plugins I used to use with VSCode, but at the same time, I'm happy to no longer have to rely on them.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#457

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

mekster wrote: post #350
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…

Hardware can fix that. I'm on latest MBA but I see no problem with performance. Recent hardware does have gigs of RAM to waste. Once IntelliJ is running, which takes less than 10 seconds, projects open instantly. Probably even better on desktop machines. Frankly VS code isn't good enough yet. It's the best if isn't for JetBrains but for instance, SQL queries are still just a string (unless I've missed the obvious plu…

I think this is largely a matter of where on the stack you tend to work. VSCode is significantly better than IntelliJ/WebStorm for JavaScript projects: jump to definition and the various refactorings are, IME, more reliable on development environments based on tsserver like VSCode.

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#458

Post by ardy42 »

derefr wrote: post #279
winrid wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java doesn't have a lot of friction. In fact, IntelliJ is probably the closest you'll get today to the "golden age" of programming with something like Turbo Pascal. Also, good luck doing major refactoring with a text editor. In 2020 we can do better than find and replace.

You're conflating the language and the prosthetic used to code in it. Java is a high-friction language. Write it in a text editor, and measure how long it takes to write some working nontrivial Java. What you're measuring there is the inherent friction of Java, as a language. The IDE adds negative friction — lubrication — to the process. But that's a separate thing from the language itself. As I said, just try to thi…

> As I said, just try to think in Java (rather than Java-esque pseudocode.) Try to write a Java program in advance, in your head, that only needs typing-in (in a plain text editor!), such that it's valid the first time you type it in. Imagine how carefully and meticulously you'd have to think, to get that code right. That required meticulousness is another measure of Java's inherent friction.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. For one, writing real world code in your head would require a level of trivia memorization (e.g. the standard library function signatures) that most people have deemed a waste of time. Secondly, meticulousness is usually a positive trait in a programmer. If Java's going to be negatively evaluated for that, then it needs to be shown that the kinds of meticulousness it requires don't actually add value in cases where it's used (which may not be like your cases).

Re: The Era of Visual Studio Code

#460

Post by devilduck »

Osiris wrote: post #413
nitemice wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses all three of the editors you named, I think that each serves a pretty different purpose in practice. Each aspires to be the be-all, end-all editor/IDE, but that's just unrealistic to me. For me, I use VIM all day, every day at work (C++), because while it doesn't have the full IDE experience out of the box, it's close enough, and can be brought much closer with various plugins and knowledgeable ad…

> I'm used to it That about sums it up. People use what they are used to. I don't try to convert anyone. I use the tool I like and to each their own.

Agreed. Converting other people is a fool's errand anyway. I am interested in things like EditorConfig to allow some similar settings between editors so that individual team members can use whatever software they like without affecting general code style. But I don't think EditorConfig is end-game and there's room to grow in this area.
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