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I think part of my question was related to your part 1. Are people genuinely remembering the entire API surface of their application, their language's standard

I think part of my question was related to your part 1. Are people genuinely remembering the entire API surface of their application, their language's standard library and all 3rd party dependencies for their code when using a text-mode editor like Vim? The only way I could possibly work like that is if my program wasn't bigger than a couple of files not exceeding 50 lines or if I spent all day in the API docs. It has me worried I've just got incredibly early onset memory loss I guess.

mncharity 7y ago
Part of the answer is languages have very different properties. > a couple of files not exceeding 50 lines Which in say Stan, might be a complete application, and a month's work, spent mostly wrestling with domain math and algorithm performance. Versus in say stereotyped industry Java, where it might be a day's work, doing a bit of boilerplate, design patterns, and api plumbing. Autocomplete is important if it's common to see api names of length 40. Less so if a Haskell-ish 4 is common, and 12 less so. I wonder if there's an opportunity to better convey the feel of working in various languages and environments. With so many live coding youtube videos, perhaps one could extract gif animations, to illustrate and weave into cross-language stories of best practices and inspiring expertise, of nifty tooling and UX concepts. For some better professional onboarding story than "use a diversity of languages and environments, each for some months or years, and you'll eventually develop a feel for what's possible, for what they each do well".
samvher 7y ago
I’m one of those vim users - I never use autocomplete, autorefactor or a debugger for that matter. Occasionally I have them available in something like RStudio but I don’t feel like I gain much from it. I find myself constantly jumping through the code (with / for find) and I have 3 or 4 terminals open on the same display (to see how things are defined in various files) with stackoverflow a key binding away. I definitely don’t remember how exactly I named my variables but I find that at the same time knowing just the variable name is not enough, I also want to see where and how it’s defined. I use “grep -R” a lot for that as well. Also often I end up editing files over ssh somewhere so then an IDE also wouldn’t be available, and vim always is. I’ve never tried tools for refactoring. But as mentioned elsewhere that probably wouldn’t work well for functional and/or niche languages. I generally feel pretty productive, if I had felt that there is a reward to learning these IDEs I wouldn’t have hesitated to do so.
fluffything 7y ago
> I think part of my question was related to your part 1. Are people genuinely remembering the entire API surface of their application, their language's standard library and all 3rd party dependencies for their code when using a text-mode editor like Vim? No. For example, I use emacs, and when I want to use an API for a type I just... grep for the type name, find its file, and skim its APIs, which takes me a couple of seconds but I am able to find what I want in seconds on code bases with multiple millions of lines of code. Every year people try IntelliJ, or some other IDE, with better auto completion support. After half a day full of getting it to crash, they just go back to vim or emacs, and wait till next year to try these IDEs again.

mncharity 7y ago

Part of the answer is languages have very different properties. > a couple of files not exceeding 50 lines Which in say Stan, might be a complete application, and a month's work, spent mostly wrestling with domain math and algorithm performance. Versus in say stereotyped industry Java, where it might be a day's work, doing a bit of boilerplate, design patterns, and api plumbing. Autocomplete is important if it's common to see api names of length 40. Less so if a Haskell-ish 4 is common, and 12 less so. I wonder if there's an opportunity to better convey the feel of working in various languages and environments. With so many live coding youtube videos, perhaps one could extract gif animations, to illustrate and weave into cross-language stories of best practices and inspiring expertise, of nifty tooling and UX concepts. For some better professional onboarding story than "use a diversity of languages and environments, each for some months or years, and you'll eventually develop a feel for what's possible, for what they each do well".

samvher 7y ago

I’m one of those vim users - I never use autocomplete, autorefactor or a debugger for that matter. Occasionally I have them available in something like RStudio but I don’t feel like I gain much from it. I find myself constantly jumping through the code (with / for find) and I have 3 or 4 terminals open on the same display (to see how things are defined in various files) with stackoverflow a key binding away. I definitely don’t remember how exactly I named my variables but I find that at the same time knowing just the variable name is not enough, I also want to see where and how it’s defined. I use “grep -R” a lot for that as well. Also often I end up editing files over ssh somewhere so then an IDE also wouldn’t be available, and vim always is. I’ve never tried tools for refactoring. But as mentioned elsewhere that probably wouldn’t work well for functional and/or niche languages. I generally feel pretty productive, if I had felt that there is a reward to learning these IDEs I wouldn’t have hesitated to do so.

fluffything 7y ago

> I think part of my question was related to your part 1. Are people genuinely remembering the entire API surface of their application, their language's standard library and all 3rd party dependencies for their code when using a text-mode editor like Vim? No. For example, I use emacs, and when I want to use an API for a type I just... grep for the type name, find its file, and skim its APIs, which takes me a couple of seconds but I am able to find what I want in seconds on code bases with multiple millions of lines of code. Every year people try IntelliJ, or some other IDE, with better auto completion support. After half a day full of getting it to crash, they just go back to vim or emacs, and wait till next year to try these IDEs again.