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Development Environments

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Re: Development Environments

#81

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…

> This is as ridiculous as saying an electrician will forget how to correctly wire because their wire cutters are too good.

Or as ridiculous as people forgetting huge parts of their first language because they haven't spoken it in years. Which absolutely happens.

Re: Development Environments

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> 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 And then you realize you have to refactor 25% of it, or the requirements change, or a newly incorporated library suggests a naming convention change would be wise... IDEs not only show the code, you can pick a function argument, rename it, and get it renamed across all…

You don't even need a terminal editor to do that; sed will do it fine. If you want to be pedantic about the mechanism by which you achieve the result, you can just use ctags, which even plain vi and emacs support.

What really set IDEs apart from text editors was integrated build tools and the ability to directly consume (and act on) build errors and the like. Search-and-replace long predates IDEs, as does 'code comprehension.'

Re: Development Environments

#83
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 And then you realize you have to refactor 25% of it, or the requirements change, or a newly incorporated library suggests a naming convention change would be wise... IDEs not only show the code, you can pick a function argument, rename it, and get it renamed across all…

You don't even need a terminal editor to do that; sed will do it fine. If you want to be pedantic about the mechanism by which you achieve the result, you can just use ctags, which even plain vi and emacs support. What really set IDEs apart from text editors was integrated build tools and the ability to directly consume (and act on) build errors and the like. Search-and-replace long predates IDEs, as does 'code compr…

I've coded in plain text editors all the way to full blown IDEs, and you're partially right, it's not the tooling that sets IDEs apart, but the seamless integration between several useful tools.

I like small editors for small jobs, but I wouldn't dream of doing a new business application without an IDE these days. With sed a simple search and replace would need to be manually checked for unintended effects, but an IDE will do it without problems in seconds, unless you go out of your way to confuse it.

Re: Development Environments

#84

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 finally pushed me to use an IDE was the code inspection tools running in the background, and lighting up my likely bugs and style mistakes. So it's actually reacting to my code and doing something, rather than just flooding me with information.

For now, Spyder (for Python) is just right. VSCode is too much, and I haven't figured out how to turn off the features that I don't care about.

Re: Development Environments

#85

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 run on an M1 Max with 64gb of RAM and gave a lot of RAM to IntelliJ (Ultimate). It flies. As professionals we need to spend on our tools and on our hardware to get the most out of both.

The problem with that is you'll more than likely create applications that work fine on your fancy high-end systems but end up unusably slow on normal people's hardware.

Re: Development Environments

#86
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 And then you realize you have to refactor 25% of it, or the requirements change, or a newly incorporated library suggests a naming convention change would be wise... IDEs not only show the code, you can pick a function argument, rename it, and get it renamed across all…

You don't even need a terminal editor to do that; sed will do it fine. If you want to be pedantic about the mechanism by which you achieve the result, you can just use ctags, which even plain vi and emacs support. What really set IDEs apart from text editors was integrated build tools and the ability to directly consume (and act on) build errors and the like. Search-and-replace long predates IDEs, as does 'code compr…

sed can't rename all references of MyUniquelyNamedClass::Update() to MyUniquelyNamedClass::Update2(). IDEs understand types and context.

Re: Development Environments

#87

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…

In my experience, most IDE users don’t know that Emacs is effectively an IDE that can do all of the same things, and even more. When you show them, then the complaint is that it’s a hassle to configure, and I don’t really know what to do with that. I like configuring my text editor.

I’ve worked with tools my entire life and the main difference between Emacs / VI and other IDEs is they’re tools you can hone infinitely and truly make an extension of your mind, as opposed to IDEs which more fit the “choose the best tool for the job” mentality, which I appreciate, but does not apply to text editing to me because of how Emacs / VI shifted my mindset.

Emacs still feels 1000x more modern to me than any IDE, especially VS Code. And I agree that text editing / better IDEs really are not the problem in software development.

Re: Development Environments

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't written LSP so I'll reserve the opinion at that. What I understood about emacs is that it doesn't have a concept of a project so I don't see how it can form dependencies that are more sophisticated. But maybe I don't understand something about that. I can totally write these sort of plugins for any IDE I worked with. Notice that all of these capabilities are symbols of a bygone time where you stuck everythi…

> What I understood about emacs is that it doesn't have a concept of a project Not built-in, but there are packages available for that.

A wise man once told me, if you can't find a package that does most of what you want in emacs, you're using the wrong search terms.

Re: Development Environments

#89
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can use text editors and other IDEs just fine. An IDE gives me more power and for 99% of my work I can live within it. I'm just slower. I used Visual Studio when working with C# which is fine. Not as great. Didn't get a chance to do either Zig or Rust in practice (both look great and I would want to go there). This argument is like arguing against shoes because of "what will you do when you're barefoot".

I think its more like "what will you do when you need need hiking boots and you've got snow shoes and no budget"

Re: Development Environments

#90
post #27

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…

Meanwhile the author of XEmacs says he prefers modern IDEs.

[Citation needed]
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