6 ms·

> I want to write code on a 2 lb MacBook, with continuous build-as-you-type in the cloud on a fleet of Xeons that have larger CPU caches than my entire project.

by zeveb 10y ago

> I want to write code on a 2 lb MacBook, with continuous build-as-you-type in the cloud on a fleet of Xeons that have larger CPU caches than my entire project. Your editor doesn't need to run remotely in order to do this; it just needs to be able to run things remotely in order to do it. > I want my editor, exactly as I left it, down to the open tabs and cursor position, on any machine. You could build this from syncthing and emacs, if you wanted. > And pair-programming Google docs simultaneous-edit style, without either party giving up the ability to run/debug the software on their own. You can do this, too, with emacs. It's just a simple matter of programming. Why spend time reinventing the wheel when there's already a network-aware, extensible editor with man-centuries (man-millennia?) of extensions already built?

mawburn 10y ago
What if he doesn't want to spend the next 6yrs learning Emacs? c9 has a very low entry bar. It's not reinventing the wheel, it's improving it. You can't really compare a terminal based editor, with an extremely high learning curve, to a preconfigured web based IDE.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > What if he doesn't want to spend the next 6yrs learning Emacs? From rms's ruminations on Lisp & emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html): >> Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. It's really not hard to use a decent text editor like emacs. > You can't really compare a terminal based editor emacs has supported X11 since at least November 1994 — your information is at least two decades out of date. I've got a nice GUI emacs frame open right now. > with an extremely high learning curve Learning emacs is not really hard at all. There's a lot to learn, but that's because it does a lot. If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. > to a preconfigured web based IDE Check out emacs prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude): it's a great some of mostly-sane emacs defaults in one easy-to-use package. Heck, emacs out of the box is pretty great, too. It evens displays a nice little message about how to use its built-in tutorial.
  - mawburn 10y ago
    >If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. That's as wrong as 2+2=5.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      > > If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. > That's as wrong as 2+2=5. If something can be quickly learnt, then it can't have been too different from what one already knows: i.e., the diff between HEAD & HEAD~1 is relatively small. But small diffs don't do much. Emacs has a gentle but very long learning curve: it's quick to pick up (quicker than vi!) because it does have some similarities to tools one may already be familiar with, but there's real depth and complexity to emacs as a whole, which means that one never stops learning it. Kinda like life in general: being born was easy, and we never stop learning after.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        As someone that's tried many times to learn Emacs, I found Vim's basic features a lot easier to pick up. I think that may be because all the mode changes are single keys, rather than Emacs, where I constantly have to ask things like "Okay, was it control, alt, meta, or some combination + S to save my file?" Vim does the : command line thing, but it's an actual command line, with editing, rather than a series of hotkeys. This annoys me because I'd really like to learn Emacs. It seems you can live in it - but the learning curve is hardly gentle.
        alyandon 10y ago
        I have more or less the same problem coming from vi(m). I forced myself to use Emacs for about 2-3 months to get past the "this is hard because it is unfamiliar" stage. I found Emacs to be relatively pleasant as an environment for hacking source code but I was nowhere near the same level of proficiency at editing with it after several months of usage compared to where I was within a few weeks of forcing myself to learn vi(m). Emacs has a lot going for it as far as out of the box functionality and the ease of installing packages but it seems that unless you want to take the time to dive deep and learn the minutiae of elisp and configuration you are never really going to become super proficient with it. The one thing I did come away with after using Emacs was that swapping ctrl/capslocks is the best thing ever and helps even with vi(m) and I now do that for all my environments even though I never touch Emacs anymore.
Rezo 10y ago
You're telling me rsync already does everything that I want to do, when I'm trying to describe Dropbox.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > You're telling me rsync already does everything that I want to do, when I'm trying to describe Dropbox. Alternatively, you're trying to say that a McDonald's Happy Meal™ is great food, when I'm serving salt-crusted ribeye, served with fresh English peas, roasted sweet corn and garlic mashed potatoes with cream.
  - fogleman 10y ago
    But you're not serving it, you're just selling the ingredients.
    - solipsism 10y ago
      Good quality ingredients is the most important part, some chefs would say. You're right, but all you'd have to do is build an opinionated "skin" over Emacs, bringing together and properly configuring existing plugins, writing some new ones, and packaging it nicely. I recently started using Spacemacs[1], and I'm basically sold on Emacs as an IDE-building toolkit. And I say that as a decades-long Vim user (I still use Vim, just as key bindings within Spacemacs). [1] http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs
      - bastijn 10y ago
        > ... > You're right, but all you'd have to do is build cloud9 yourself. > I recently.. There, I fixed it for you. Now why would anyone want to reinvent the wheel again?
        solipsism 10y ago
        Eh.. what? Cloud9 is the reinvention of the wheel. That's the point you missed. With far fewer features, it just happens to be packaged together nicely to suit a particular purpose. Cloud 9 is one of many. In 3 years you won't remember the name.
beachstartup 10y ago
let's also not forget that constantly building stuff on xeon cores costs a lot of money.

by zeveb 10y ago

mawburn 10y ago

What if he doesn't want to spend the next 6yrs learning Emacs? c9 has a very low entry bar. It's not reinventing the wheel, it's improving it. You can't really compare a terminal based editor, with an extremely high learning curve, to a preconfigured web based IDE.

zeveb 10y ago
> What if he doesn't want to spend the next 6yrs learning Emacs? From rms's ruminations on Lisp & emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.en.html): >> Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program. It's really not hard to use a decent text editor like emacs. > You can't really compare a terminal based editor emacs has supported X11 since at least November 1994 — your information is at least two decades out of date. I've got a nice GUI emacs frame open right now. > with an extremely high learning curve Learning emacs is not really hard at all. There's a lot to learn, but that's because it does a lot. If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. > to a preconfigured web based IDE Check out emacs prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude): it's a great some of mostly-sane emacs defaults in one easy-to-use package. Heck, emacs out of the box is pretty great, too. It evens displays a nice little message about how to use its built-in tutorial.
- mawburn 10y ago
  >If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. That's as wrong as 2+2=5.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > > If something is quick to learn, by definition there can't be much substance to it. > That's as wrong as 2+2=5. If something can be quickly learnt, then it can't have been too different from what one already knows: i.e., the diff between HEAD & HEAD~1 is relatively small. But small diffs don't do much. Emacs has a gentle but very long learning curve: it's quick to pick up (quicker than vi!) because it does have some similarities to tools one may already be familiar with, but there's real depth and complexity to emacs as a whole, which means that one never stops learning it. Kinda like life in general: being born was easy, and we never stop learning after.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      As someone that's tried many times to learn Emacs, I found Vim's basic features a lot easier to pick up. I think that may be because all the mode changes are single keys, rather than Emacs, where I constantly have to ask things like "Okay, was it control, alt, meta, or some combination + S to save my file?" Vim does the : command line thing, but it's an actual command line, with editing, rather than a series of hotkeys. This annoys me because I'd really like to learn Emacs. It seems you can live in it - but the learning curve is hardly gentle.
      - alyandon 10y ago
        I have more or less the same problem coming from vi(m). I forced myself to use Emacs for about 2-3 months to get past the "this is hard because it is unfamiliar" stage. I found Emacs to be relatively pleasant as an environment for hacking source code but I was nowhere near the same level of proficiency at editing with it after several months of usage compared to where I was within a few weeks of forcing myself to learn vi(m). Emacs has a lot going for it as far as out of the box functionality and the ease of installing packages but it seems that unless you want to take the time to dive deep and learn the minutiae of elisp and configuration you are never really going to become super proficient with it. The one thing I did come away with after using Emacs was that swapping ctrl/capslocks is the best thing ever and helps even with vi(m) and I now do that for all my environments even though I never touch Emacs anymore.

Rezo 10y ago

You're telling me rsync already does everything that I want to do, when I'm trying to describe Dropbox.

zeveb 10y ago
> You're telling me rsync already does everything that I want to do, when I'm trying to describe Dropbox. Alternatively, you're trying to say that a McDonald's Happy Meal™ is great food, when I'm serving salt-crusted ribeye, served with fresh English peas, roasted sweet corn and garlic mashed potatoes with cream.
- fogleman 10y ago
  But you're not serving it, you're just selling the ingredients.
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Good quality ingredients is the most important part, some chefs would say. You're right, but all you'd have to do is build an opinionated "skin" over Emacs, bringing together and properly configuring existing plugins, writing some new ones, and packaging it nicely. I recently started using Spacemacs[1], and I'm basically sold on Emacs as an IDE-building toolkit. And I say that as a decades-long Vim user (I still use Vim, just as key bindings within Spacemacs). [1] http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs http://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs
    - bastijn 10y ago
      > ... > You're right, but all you'd have to do is build cloud9 yourself. > I recently.. There, I fixed it for you. Now why would anyone want to reinvent the wheel again?
      - solipsism 10y ago
        Eh.. what? Cloud9 is the reinvention of the wheel. That's the point you missed. With far fewer features, it just happens to be packaged together nicely to suit a particular purpose. Cloud 9 is one of many. In 3 years you won't remember the name.

beachstartup 10y ago

let's also not forget that constantly building stuff on xeon cores costs a lot of money.