3 ms·

But why write code on the web? If you are typing you are already on a computer

kylestlb 8y ago
I hear you. I'm sure a lot of other people lurking here agree as well.
jakelazaroff 8y ago
Conversely, if all you need is a web IDE that abstracts individual tools away, why bother dealing with them? Setting up and maintaining a development environment environment is at best annoying and at worst daunting, especially if you're a beginner.
closeparen 8y ago
Lots of companies do their development work on per-developer remote VMs, especially for resource-intensive applications that need nontrivial configuration-management setup for databases, message queues, etc. that they depend on. Currently your choices are emacs/vim over SSH or sync from your local machine (where the code intelligence / debugging integration probably doesn't work as desired). A web IDE allows an arbitrarily powerful cloud instance to do the heavy lifting of build/test/code intelligence while the developer still gets a full-featured GUI IDE. Especially since VS Code and Atom are Electron apps, it's a natural step to use them to edit remote files. Better than VNC, anyway.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  You can already have an arbitrarily-powerful instance do the heavy lifting in these cases. Cloud-based instance, if you want to do it on someone else's computer. The first time I've seen it (not used it, though), Sun workstations were still a thing. There are various tools to do distributed compilation with various degrees of smartness, though I'm seeing them in action less and less often because, quite frankly, Moore's law has made them more and more unnecessary in the last 7-10 years. VNC isn't the right way to go in these cases. If a company is asking its developers to do remote work over VNC, and they aren't a three-person company struggling with financial and administrative resources, what they need is an IT manager and/or a build system engineer, not a web IDE. We already have plenty of IDEs that can't hold a candle to Visual Studio, the umpteenth one BUT ON THE WEB is pretty much the last thing we need.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
tuukkah 8y ago
Why write and commit locally and then push to an online repository separately? Nice to have it all on the web especially if it's a big system and CI tests will run quicker in a cloud environment.

I hear you. I'm sure a lot of other people lurking here agree as well.

Conversely, if all you need is a web IDE that abstracts individual tools away, why bother dealing with them? Setting up and maintaining a development environment environment is at best annoying and at worst daunting, especially if you're a beginner.

closeparen 8y ago

Lots of companies do their development work on per-developer remote VMs, especially for resource-intensive applications that need nontrivial configuration-management setup for databases, message queues, etc. that they depend on. Currently your choices are emacs/vim over SSH or sync from your local machine (where the code intelligence / debugging integration probably doesn't work as desired). A web IDE allows an arbitrarily powerful cloud instance to do the heavy lifting of build/test/code intelligence while the developer still gets a full-featured GUI IDE. Especially since VS Code and Atom are Electron apps, it's a natural step to use them to edit remote files. Better than VNC, anyway.

alxlaz 8y ago
You can already have an arbitrarily-powerful instance do the heavy lifting in these cases. Cloud-based instance, if you want to do it on someone else's computer. The first time I've seen it (not used it, though), Sun workstations were still a thing. There are various tools to do distributed compilation with various degrees of smartness, though I'm seeing them in action less and less often because, quite frankly, Moore's law has made them more and more unnecessary in the last 7-10 years. VNC isn't the right way to go in these cases. If a company is asking its developers to do remote work over VNC, and they aren't a three-person company struggling with financial and administrative resources, what they need is an IT manager and/or a build system engineer, not a web IDE. We already have plenty of IDEs that can't hold a candle to Visual Studio, the umpteenth one BUT ON THE WEB is pretty much the last thing we need.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

tuukkah 8y ago

Why write and commit locally and then push to an online repository separately? Nice to have it all on the web especially if it's a big system and CI tests will run quicker in a cloud environment.