The Return of Fancy Tools • Hacker News Board

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#61

Post by meierjo » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

jes wrote: post #52

Edit code like a grandpa in neovim... Love it! At 61 I am a grandpa, prefer GNU Emacs over vi, but still have fond memories of using vi on 4.2BSD systems. Long time ago!

Ahhh vi. I was reading the article hoping to see mention of vi…

Emacs was cool too, but I never got hooked - was very comfortable in vi land as it was the first editor I used on the old time terminals (green/amber CRT and a keyboard you could kill with). Oh the power of vi/EMACs and regular expressions without ever lifting a finger from the keyboard!

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#62

Post by bliteben » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:45 AM UTC

breakfastduck wrote: post #46

johns wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drumbeat was incredible. VB for the web.

No web UI component framework has matched the usability of VB. Why haven't we seen a true successor? Microsoft should do a native TypeScriptVB or something.

I love how xcode's object -> function mapping seems inspired by visual basic / delphi, but actually makes no fucking sense when compared to those tools.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#63

Post by bliteben » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

breakfastduck wrote: post #31

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine as well...in 2015, at a university that maintained lot of small-to-medium complexity websites. It did the job well and was easy to work with, even if I sometimes felt like was carving in my 1s and 0s with stone and chisel. But if I were still working there I would probably replace most of the sites - which were largely abstractions of forms and tables - with something like power apps instead.

Still can't comprehend why we haven't had 'winforms' again but modern and not windows based. Power Apps is good but not great.

Same reason people will spend thousands of hours working on libraries like pandas but won't make a better excel. Or something like that.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#64

Post by amhenk » Sat, May 15, 2021, 3:49 AM UTC

systematical wrote: post #42

Linear looks nice. Anyone using it?

I've been using it for side projects and I'm a big fan. The keyboard shortcuts are convenient and they make it easy to pick them up as you navigate around the app. I also like their approach to the traditional epic with projects that have their own set of work items/timeline. Overall I feel like it's more intuitive than what I use for work

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#65

Post by steveklabnik » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:03 AM UTC

greatgoat420 wrote: post #37

steveklabnik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it’s all very opinionated. I think at this point I am borderline “I would rather have no bug tracker than Jira.” Issues isn’t perfect but it’s the best I’ve ever used.

I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

I agree with both of the others who replied. Jira has infinite knobs, and they all get turned, and you build this massive, complex system when what you really need is a textbox and some tags.

I am not normally a "less features is more" kind of person. But with issue tracking, I am.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#66

Post by imwillofficial » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:06 AM UTC

I really enjoyed this take. I hadn't thought of our tools going from complex to simple and back again. Insightful.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#67

Post by imwillofficial » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

wyclif wrote: post #49

fsv, which is a clone of fsn (the file system navigator seen in the film Jurrasic Park) is still around and useable even though it's not maintained anymore: https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv

Thanks for sharing!

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#68

Post by ashneo76 » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:38 AM UTC

0xCMP wrote: post #58

It's basically cause of mobile. Simple tools often involve using files. Using plain text files too. I don't think the pendulum will swing back the same. Files are a bad abstraction. Databases via HTTP APIs are far more reliable for using between all our devices. Syncing files without something like Git is very painful and for Git to be used the user themselves need to be able to handle the diff themselves correctly.…

Files are a great abstraction. They give you ownership, actual one, not the kind sold by apple or Netflix. Files give you freedom to share informatiin instead of being held in a database by some third party with different intentions than your freedoms. Please don't spread FUD

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#69

Post by pessimizer » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

ashneo76 wrote: post #68

0xCMP wrote: post #58

It's basically cause of mobile. Simple tools often involve using files. Using plain text files too. I don't think the pendulum will swing back the same. Files are a bad abstraction. Databases via HTTP APIs are far more reliable for using between all our devices. Syncing files without something like Git is very painful and for Git to be used the user themselves need to be able to handle the diff themselves correctly.…

Files are a great abstraction. They give you ownership, actual one, not the kind sold by apple or Netflix. Files give you freedom to share informatiin instead of being held in a database by some third party with different intentions than your freedoms. Please don't spread FUD

I think it was just an observation, not a recommendation. If we can't defend a free lifestyle from within this new, messy, network, then the future is proprietary and rented from the cloud.

Re: The Return of Fancy Tools

#70

Post by chii » Sat, May 15, 2021, 4:47 AM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #60

bitexploder wrote: post #44

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm/IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C/C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and ex…

Jira still for the complex stuff, with many teams in enterprises. But maybe less than it was in simple projects, with one-to-one relationships between issues tracking and repository?

There's a bias in HN that favours the simple and clean. But the real world is full of bureaucracies and complications due to legacy and/or politics or some other factors (like momentum).

When HN users argue that certain tools (like Jira) is too complex, they imagine that a simpler tool following a simpler process would've worked. For them, may be it would, as a greenfield project, but not for the enterprise currently using Jira or is going to adopt it.