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What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

briandfoy.github.io

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Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#51

Post by kcb »

rektide wrote: post #29
dmitriid wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

Meh. If you want "infinite capabilities and unlimited potential" you should learn the best tool for each job. Not the one that works ok all the time.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#52

Post by datavirtue »

I get a little bit of sanity when I sit down and realize that my colleagues have written this new system in raw fucking JavaScript. The IDE saves me a few hours each day by renaming and highlighting variables for me. Still lots of cussing and needless flow interruptions but it helps.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#53

Post by ipaddr »

The speed of loading an ide first thing, the speed within the and the memory hogging is the biggest reason against an ide.

Others reasons matter: - It allows you to be lazier and never learn the actual method names instead remembering two or three characters - Switching editors could leave you lost. Sometimes you have to code in vim, notepad, gedit or a different ide. And without your ide could destory your mental workflow.

SublimeText fan.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#54

Post by digisign »

UglyToad wrote: post #46
morvita wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Docs are typically built from source on modern platforms. There's not reason to restrict type information to a particular set of tools when you are bothering to build documentation. Otherwise might as well save your time.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#55

Post by rehevkor5 »

It seems like the author understands, or perhaps his criteria is based on, only a thin layer of what an IDE can provide. Here's the highlights:

- Data flow to/from here (where did the value of this variable come from/go to)

- Call hierarchy (up and down)

- Class hierarchy (up and down)

- Class structure (including all inherited fields, methods)

- Checking your code against an actual database schema, perhaps one automatically launched in a Docker container

- Automatic refactoring of various kinds (rename, extract variable, extract method, inline method, extract interface, add/remove parameters, etc.)

- Build tool dependency tree inspection with filtering etc.

- Inspect code for a huge variety of potential code quality issues, with highlighting and auto-resolutions available

- Locate duplicate code, and automatically refactor it out

- Detect likely problems with nullity

- Easily navigate to lines of code in an exception call stack

- Analyze dependencies across classes & packages, detect cyclical dependencies

- Debugging, including watch windows and conditional breakpoints of various kinds

- Helpful tools for a variety of programming frameworks such as Spring

- Integration with git so you can view history, diffs, etc.

- WYSIWYG style rendering for stuff like Markdown

- Easily navigate to any class, including classes that come from your dependencies (for example I've worked with plenty of people who had no idea how to figure out how Rails worked if it wasn't in the documentation, because they didn't use an IDE which allowed them to easily browse the code)

Personally, all of that is just a huge amount of value.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#56

Post by couchand »

wrnr wrote: post #32
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #10

There's a common argument from craftsmen embedded in here. When something decreases accessibility of something difficult, the people who already know how to do the difficult thing criticize it, because from their eyes, it brings the average quality down. But ease and accessibility always win. This goes for IDEs, programming languages, frameworks, etc. Think of a language like PHP, which made it so easy to code that c…

One thing I've learned over 10 years of doing this is how much code is actually required to do anything, having more expressive language is one thing but tools that can help me cram out this stuff are also appreciated.

One thing I've learned over more than 10 years of doing this is how much code actually should be deleted instead of fixed. Thanks for giving me a reliable source of income ;)

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#57

Post by emodendroket »

This seems rather silly, doesn't it? A modern IDE like IntelliJ is going to be full of "golf" suggestions anyway, so I find it hard to believe that IDE-composed code is actually going to be more verbose!

In my experience CRs from non-IDE users were more likely to have issues like unused imports, weird formatting, unused variables, and so on, because their text editors won't yell at them over that (perhaps a linter should be set up to catch it but let's face it, few people have all the things they'd like to have in place).

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#58

Post by rektide »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #45
rektide wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 suggesti…

I want to improve & grow, get better at computing.

This idea of being good enough, embracing mediocre capabilities for life & only focusing on shirt term output forever is exactly the local minima this post is warning against. Selling yourself a compromised future, being a passive consumer of technology, is anathema to the greater objectives of life & computing, in my view.

Selling yourself on comprimise, swearing you have served yourself, also seems hollow when one is deliberately snubbing trying to raise themselves to a perch where they are capable of evaluating. The anti-elite pitch is easy because it doesnt even have to get good enough to assess the merits & values of the school of lifelong learning & struggles. As for your precious output, it might be totally different & better if you had opted to invest in yourself & see technology as less than a lever you know how to crank.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#59

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I use an IDE (Xcode). Works a treat.

I'm also very effective, and very fast. I write fairly significant volumes of well-structured, well-documented code, in a pretty short period of time.

It seems work well, too.

I don't really give a hoot whether or not anyone else thinks I'm somehow "lesser," because I use an IDE.

DISCLAIMER: I started programming well into the last century, and have used CLIs that would have a lot of folks curled up, under their desks, whimpering. It's just that I’m not a touch typist, so couldn’t ever really get comfortable with CLIs.

Re: What do you really get from IDE-driven development?

#60

Post by kcb »

rektide wrote: post #58
throwaway675309 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 suggesti…

I want to improve & grow, get better at computing. This idea of being good enough, embracing mediocre capabilities for life & only focusing on shirt term output forever is exactly the local minima this post is warning against. Selling yourself a compromised future, being a passive consumer of technology, is anathema to the greater objectives of life & computing, in my view. Selling yourself on comprimise, swearing yo…

We build on the shoulders of giants and there's nothing wrong with that. The terminal is just one abstraction down of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction. Not very impressive.
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