4 ms·

Not having graphical tooling is a net positive in my experience. I’m a programmer, not a graphic designer. Also the UI while visually clunky is neat and free o

by rusk 7y ago

Not having graphical tooling is a net positive in my experience. I’m a programmer, not a graphic designer. Also the UI while visually clunky is neat and free of distractions. The only IDE I use these days in IntelliJ for Java - because Java is one of those few languages that really benefits from integrated development. Great as it is, I do find myself having to relearn a few things every year or so, and often having to readjust to changes in look and feel, and for what?

pjmlp 7y ago
I happen to be a programmer that also does graphics, GUIs and GPGPU debugging, graphical display of data structures. Then there are those architecture design documents, DB tooling integration, bug ticket/source control/task management.
- rusk 7y ago
  Sounds like fairly specialised tools for that stuff. I typically use a document editor, to you know, write documents ...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Sorry I thought we were talking about development tools here.
    - rusk 7y ago
      Text editors
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        And how they lack features to match what IDEs are capable of. Given that James Gosling created XEmacs, my go-to editor back in the day, I think you will find this interview interesting, although most certainly it won't change your opinion. https://thenewstack.io/a-conversation-with-the-creators-behind-python-java-typescript-and-perl/ https://thenewstack.io/a-conversation-with-the-creators-behi...
        rusk 7y ago
        Thanks for this, nothing jumps out at me vis-a-vis our exchange here but since you took the time to post it I will take the time to read it. It's not so much that I have strongly held beliefs so much as a combination of experiences that have led me to the juncture where I see most codebases as being quite unstructured, and I appreciate the benefits of a more unstructured tool for dealing with them. The baseband for nearly everything I work with is text, pretty much all of Latin form (ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-x etc). When it comes to having to switch context between various languages and codebases, all of many and varying levels of hygene, I've come to a conclusion that I have "a particular tool" that is more suitable than most others. Of course, when I have the luxury of working with "more structured" code, I will use the appropriate tools, but quite often the tools don't work as effectively once the code deviates from more idiomatic structure (Eclips is notably robust in this sense - but I find it can be quite clunky). But if I have the time to learn the tools, and the tools can make the code more "fluid" to work with then I'm all for it. In particular "Java" (which is I presume why you're linking Gosling) lends itself to this, and I did make this point above. The language itself is so robust, and the development culture seems to value best practices well enough that making the investment to learn these tools is worthwhile (EDIT - exactly in the sense that Gosling describes in TFA). Another example in recent times has been Apple XCode when doing IOS development. The tool-chain is far too complex for me to get a "bottom up" appreciation of how it works, and the IDE in that case works just fine for me. But these are exceptions in my 20 years or so of experience. More often than not I've a big mess to be dealing with that demands a powerful text editor. As a younger guy I used to spend hours trying to set up my IDE and get projects to work with my tools, but I've got kids to feed now and have other stuff to do. EDIT - read it now. Still unclear of what point you are making, unless you are erroneously assigning me to the "real men use vi" camp ... vi (or vim) has it's place, but I wouldn't really put it in the same category as Emacs, except for the fact that maybe Emacs has a terminal mode of operation. vi to me is more like windows notepad. It's always there when I need to quickly edit a configuration file.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]

by rusk 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

I happen to be a programmer that also does graphics, GUIs and GPGPU debugging, graphical display of data structures. Then there are those architecture design documents, DB tooling integration, bug ticket/source control/task management.

rusk 7y ago
Sounds like fairly specialised tools for that stuff. I typically use a document editor, to you know, write documents ...
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Sorry I thought we were talking about development tools here.
  - rusk 7y ago
    Text editors
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      And how they lack features to match what IDEs are capable of. Given that James Gosling created XEmacs, my go-to editor back in the day, I think you will find this interview interesting, although most certainly it won't change your opinion. https://thenewstack.io/a-conversation-with-the-creators-behind-python-java-typescript-and-perl/ https://thenewstack.io/a-conversation-with-the-creators-behi...
      - rusk 7y ago
        Thanks for this, nothing jumps out at me vis-a-vis our exchange here but since you took the time to post it I will take the time to read it. It's not so much that I have strongly held beliefs so much as a combination of experiences that have led me to the juncture where I see most codebases as being quite unstructured, and I appreciate the benefits of a more unstructured tool for dealing with them. The baseband for nearly everything I work with is text, pretty much all of Latin form (ASCII, UTF-8, ISO-8859-x etc). When it comes to having to switch context between various languages and codebases, all of many and varying levels of hygene, I've come to a conclusion that I have "a particular tool" that is more suitable than most others. Of course, when I have the luxury of working with "more structured" code, I will use the appropriate tools, but quite often the tools don't work as effectively once the code deviates from more idiomatic structure (Eclips is notably robust in this sense - but I find it can be quite clunky). But if I have the time to learn the tools, and the tools can make the code more "fluid" to work with then I'm all for it. In particular "Java" (which is I presume why you're linking Gosling) lends itself to this, and I did make this point above. The language itself is so robust, and the development culture seems to value best practices well enough that making the investment to learn these tools is worthwhile (EDIT - exactly in the sense that Gosling describes in TFA). Another example in recent times has been Apple XCode when doing IOS development. The tool-chain is far too complex for me to get a "bottom up" appreciation of how it works, and the IDE in that case works just fine for me. But these are exceptions in my 20 years or so of experience. More often than not I've a big mess to be dealing with that demands a powerful text editor. As a younger guy I used to spend hours trying to set up my IDE and get projects to work with my tools, but I've got kids to feed now and have other stuff to do. EDIT - read it now. Still unclear of what point you are making, unless you are erroneously assigning me to the "real men use vi" camp ... vi (or vim) has it's place, but I wouldn't really put it in the same category as Emacs, except for the fact that maybe Emacs has a terminal mode of operation. vi to me is more like windows notepad. It's always there when I need to quickly edit a configuration file.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]