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(from the slides) >I learned Emacs in September, 1983 >It is now November, 2019 >...that’s over thirty six years! >An amazingly long time. Hmm, I think I l

by Isamu 7y ago

(from the slides) >I learned Emacs in September, 1983 >It is now November, 2019 >...that’s over thirty six years! >An amazingly long time. Hmm, I think I learned Emacs around the same time. Yes, sometimes I think it is weird that I'm still using it. I get a lot of pushback when I say that the developer environment hasn't advanced amazingly in all those years. Devs will point to one or more rather small incremental improvement. I'm sorry but I think we are still in the Bronze Age of programming.

jimbokun 7y ago
No, productivity has increased massively, but not due to better editors or IDEs. Those have shown only marginal improvements, if any. (Is any modern environment more productive than a Lisp Machine or Smalltalk?) But some of the main productivity drivers are distributed version control systems, dependency management libraries, and sites like GitHub for sharing code and libraries. Being able to automatically generate a project from a template, and pull in any open source library written by anyone on the planet with a single line in a config file, is amazing. Also, remote hosting and cloud provisioning to quickly deploy any code to be used by anyone in the world with a web browser. Arguably even app stores by eliminating the need to figure out distribution and payments on your own. (The stuff maybe not everyone considers "development", but is key to the overall productivity of any software project.)
- gutnor 7y ago
  Massive increase in personal computer power (cloud or physical). Internet and resources like stack overflow. Back in the days, I remember the isolation. First from the domain, we could only run part of the application or use unnaturally tiny dataset meaning that the application behaviour in prod was an abstract concept. Hell, we could not even build the app at all on large application. Second from knowledge. If you didn't know something, you needed to pick a book and read or find someone who knew. Nowadays, with a few hours on the net, you can build enough of a working knowledge of a tech to at least know if it is worth the investment.
  - anthk 7y ago
    >Back in the days, I remember the isolation. There were newsgroups, basically SO on comp.* subgroups.
    - lottin 7y ago
      In the 80s and early 90s most people didn't have internet.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Have you ever used ReSharper or IntelliJ IDEA for any real work? I think not.
  - gumby 7y ago
    I used IntelliJ for a couple of years and it was quite painful compared to the lispm. The only advantage is that the machines are faster.
worldsayshi 7y ago
The main reason I quit Emacs was the lack of context and semantically aware code completion and re-factoring tools. Such tools are invaluable productivity boosts for me. I have never gotten that to work in Emacs to a satisfactory degree.
- wry_discontent 7y ago
  This is true for me too. I still do some of my personal projects in Emacs, and I still use Magit, and dired, and a few others, but by and large my professional development is mostly in the family of JetBrains editors. Ideally, their code analysis could work through a server and use Emacs as a frontend, but the existing tools don't even come close to what those IDEs can do. Emacs is great, but it's not the most productive tool for me to edit large projects.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
    I've seen posts about how to set up vim as a frontend for a headless Eclipse server, but it always looked to me like the payoff wasn't worth the effort.
- billfruit 7y ago
  OTOH hlmost many modern IDEs can't even open two copies of the same file and display it side by side or record arbitrarily complex macros and play them back any number of times.
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    Don't know about the second, but displaying two copies of the same file side by side is pretty common in my experience, e.g.: PyCharm: Yes VS Code: Yes Eclipse: Yes
    - olejorgenb 7y ago
      Vs code can't open two windows properly though..
seeker61 7y ago
"the Brone Age of programming." And that's being generous.

by Isamu 7y ago

jimbokun 7y ago

No, productivity has increased massively, but not due to better editors or IDEs. Those have shown only marginal improvements, if any. (Is any modern environment more productive than a Lisp Machine or Smalltalk?) But some of the main productivity drivers are distributed version control systems, dependency management libraries, and sites like GitHub for sharing code and libraries. Being able to automatically generate a project from a template, and pull in any open source library written by anyone on the planet with a single line in a config file, is amazing. Also, remote hosting and cloud provisioning to quickly deploy any code to be used by anyone in the world with a web browser. Arguably even app stores by eliminating the need to figure out distribution and payments on your own. (The stuff maybe not everyone considers "development", but is key to the overall productivity of any software project.)

gutnor 7y ago
Massive increase in personal computer power (cloud or physical). Internet and resources like stack overflow. Back in the days, I remember the isolation. First from the domain, we could only run part of the application or use unnaturally tiny dataset meaning that the application behaviour in prod was an abstract concept. Hell, we could not even build the app at all on large application. Second from knowledge. If you didn't know something, you needed to pick a book and read or find someone who knew. Nowadays, with a few hours on the net, you can build enough of a working knowledge of a tech to at least know if it is worth the investment.
- anthk 7y ago
  >Back in the days, I remember the isolation. There were newsgroups, basically SO on comp.* subgroups.
  - lottin 7y ago
    In the 80s and early 90s most people didn't have internet.
lostmsu 7y ago
Have you ever used ReSharper or IntelliJ IDEA for any real work? I think not.
- gumby 7y ago
  I used IntelliJ for a couple of years and it was quite painful compared to the lispm. The only advantage is that the machines are faster.

worldsayshi 7y ago

The main reason I quit Emacs was the lack of context and semantically aware code completion and re-factoring tools. Such tools are invaluable productivity boosts for me. I have never gotten that to work in Emacs to a satisfactory degree.

wry_discontent 7y ago
This is true for me too. I still do some of my personal projects in Emacs, and I still use Magit, and dired, and a few others, but by and large my professional development is mostly in the family of JetBrains editors. Ideally, their code analysis could work through a server and use Emacs as a frontend, but the existing tools don't even come close to what those IDEs can do. Emacs is great, but it's not the most productive tool for me to edit large projects.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  I've seen posts about how to set up vim as a frontend for a headless Eclipse server, but it always looked to me like the payoff wasn't worth the effort.
billfruit 7y ago
OTOH hlmost many modern IDEs can't even open two copies of the same file and display it side by side or record arbitrarily complex macros and play them back any number of times.
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  Don't know about the second, but displaying two copies of the same file side by side is pretty common in my experience, e.g.: PyCharm: Yes VS Code: Yes Eclipse: Yes
  - olejorgenb 7y ago
    Vs code can't open two windows properly though..

seeker61 7y ago

"the Brone Age of programming." And that's being generous.