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What's often missing from these discussions is the impact on human memory. Back when I started programming, I never used syntax highlighting. It just wasn't a

What's often missing from these discussions is the impact on human memory. Back when I started programming, I never used syntax highlighting. It just wasn't a thing for a large part of my early years. Text mode VisualBasic and QuickBasic didn't have it. Nor did GW-BASIC, QuickC, Pascal, I could go on... I was at the point where I could write C code and have it compile the first time. No syntax errors, no compiler errors, full -Wall and -pedantic. After using an IDE for awhile, I noticed my ability to get things right diminished. I gave up knowing things for relying on technology. One area I notice this the most is spelling. I used to be able to spell. Now I critically depend on browser or editor highlighting of errors, or throwing a word into Google to see what Google tells me. And it's not just new or complex words. It's words that I used to know how to spell. If all I had were pen and paper, I would be helpless. Some will say technology frees you to memorize other more important things. But the downside is you give up agency. And very well may just become that much more of a replaceable cog in the machine.

jonhohle 7y ago
I tend to agree with this line of thinking. I've been almost exclusively a Vim user for the past 15 years and feel like, if anything, it's made me a better programmer because I do spend a lot of time reading docs and code, refining my mental model of APIs, and often, thinking through problems before I start typing since I know that all of the characters in the file will come from strokes of my fingers. There are certain classes of autocomplete bugs that just can't happen when you're typing every #include/import/require that I find myself continually cleaning up and writing static analysis for. I spend far more time reading other people's code than writing it. Autocomplete doesn't provide any assistance there.
- strokirk 7y ago
  In what way does vim help here? It has all kinds of Syntax highlighting and autocompletion, and it's not like you can't disable it in other browsers.
scarface74 7y ago
When I first started, I spent all of my time writing C at my keyboard with few interruptions. Two decades later, at any given time, I’ll be writing C#, Python, Javascript, yml for CloudFormation, a litany of third party external dependencies, internal libraries written by developers on multiple teams, etc. Not to mention “polyglot persistence” dealing with Mysql, DynamoDB and ElasticSearch. All that and Zi purposefully avoid the front framework of the week. The scope of what I am expected to know changes.
- z3t4 7y ago
  When where you the most productive?
  - scarface74 7y ago
    It depends. Being able to do the entire stack yourself saves the communication overhead of working with a group of people. But on the other hand, for the good of the company, it’s often good to sub optimize the individual for the good of the team. You usually don’t want only one person knowing the entire feature and while you will lose out on individual productivity, you can get features out sooner if you have more people working on it. On a personal level, I love having not to wait on other departments/props to get my work done especially in a dev environment.
  - jzoch 7y ago
    What does that mean ? If you felt better and personally were prouder of the work done back in C with no autocomplete but the business was deriving more value from your work with autocomplete, how should One answer? Or more importantly, what if the requirements are so much more today that if you adopted the same tools as 20 years ago you’d fall behind? I admire those who stick with their old tools and forgo modern ones so they can stay sharp. They tend to miss the forest for the trees though.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I wasn’t implying one way or the other and I don’t think that the parent post was either. The point I was making that when I was writing C day in and day out and mostly just working with a combination of my own code and my companies vote libraries, it was easy to use just a text editor and the command line to build. But things have gotten more complicated since then. No one could be expected to know the hundreds of functions that make up the entire AWS SDK or all of the options that you need to specify for a typical CloudFormation stack in yml. Of course now it’s even better with the Cloud Developer Kit that lets you generate yml programmatically using a static language - with autocomplete.
tolmasky 7y ago
Not only this -- but it renders you quite useless if you ever have to use a different environment. Sometimes that's because you have to use a different language that doesn't have as much tooling, sometimes its because a product gets discontinued, or your employer forces a different IDE, etc. I definitely had this experience with CodeWarrior back in the day. I really loved that IDE. But then when Mac OS X came out and Objective-C became the native language, the tools weren't there yet, and I had to either program "alone" without autocomplete/fancy dynamic highlighting/etc, or use Project Builder (the predecessor to Xcode), which was lacking in all these departments. I found myself much slower, and not for the obvious reason of "of course, I'm missing all these great tools", but as you say, slower at things I knew I used to be fast at. It's kind of like discovering that no, you don't like broccoli, you actually just like the melted cheese on top. That was a big moment for me deciding to focus on generally applicable skills vs. IDE-specific skills. Interestingly enough, I think this legitimately doesn't apply to a lot of people because they spend most, if not all, their career in one domain. In that environment I think learning IDE-specific things makes a lot of sense. I discovered that this wasn't for me and move around a lot, so its nicer to not be dependent on those things.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Sometimes that's because you have to use a different language that doesn't have as much tooling, Which popular languages these days don’t have a dedicated IDE, plug ins for popular IDE’s and/or support for the language server protocol? sometimes its because a product gets discontinued, or your employer forces a different IDE, etc. I wouldn’t work for a company that forced an IDE on me. In that environment I think learning IDE-specific things makes a lot of sense. Visual Studio Code works with multiple languages as does Visual Studio.
  - tolmasky 7y ago
    > Which popular languages these days don’t have a dedicated IDE, plug ins for popular IDE’s and/or support for the language server protocol? Most new languages until someone implements it. Again, this is very dependent on what you like to do. If you like trying bleeding edge stuff then you’ll probably run up against this. > I wouldn’t work for a company that forced an IDE on me. Sure, sometimes it’s kind of out of their control (or understandable). For example Xcode at Apple. Or if you work in a dev feature that needs to work with some tool or something. Again, my position is that it’s probably fine for most people. > Visual Studio Code works with multiple languages as does Visual Studio. OK, it’s interesting you bring up a fairly new entrant as proof this (at least I’m the Mac). Again, my interest is in trying lots of syntax extensions and stuff that usually just breaks these sorts of things. As I mentioned before, if you’re doing application development on a specific set of established languages for a very long time it’s probably the right move.
utxaa 7y ago
yeah. maybe that's why i get this feeling of being out of touch with software that was written with an IDE. you can see the difference come debugging time. C/Emacs you just know where everything is, just reading the logs (sans stack trace) is enough. Java/Eclipse ... you need to bring in the heavy machinery, and then good luck to you.
funcDropShadow 7y ago
> I gave up knowing things for relying on technology. Perhaps, it is not so much giving up knowledge but filling the first-level cache with other stuff, like the larger picture of the software you are developing or the ever growing number of abstraction layers below the code you are writing. And whether that is good or bad thing is an interesting question. I am not aware, that it has an definite answer, yet.

jonhohle 7y ago

I tend to agree with this line of thinking. I've been almost exclusively a Vim user for the past 15 years and feel like, if anything, it's made me a better programmer because I do spend a lot of time reading docs and code, refining my mental model of APIs, and often, thinking through problems before I start typing since I know that all of the characters in the file will come from strokes of my fingers. There are certain classes of autocomplete bugs that just can't happen when you're typing every #include/import/require that I find myself continually cleaning up and writing static analysis for. I spend far more time reading other people's code than writing it. Autocomplete doesn't provide any assistance there.

strokirk 7y ago
In what way does vim help here? It has all kinds of Syntax highlighting and autocompletion, and it's not like you can't disable it in other browsers.

scarface74 7y ago

When I first started, I spent all of my time writing C at my keyboard with few interruptions. Two decades later, at any given time, I’ll be writing C#, Python, Javascript, yml for CloudFormation, a litany of third party external dependencies, internal libraries written by developers on multiple teams, etc. Not to mention “polyglot persistence” dealing with Mysql, DynamoDB and ElasticSearch. All that and Zi purposefully avoid the front framework of the week. The scope of what I am expected to know changes.

z3t4 7y ago
When where you the most productive?
- scarface74 7y ago
  It depends. Being able to do the entire stack yourself saves the communication overhead of working with a group of people. But on the other hand, for the good of the company, it’s often good to sub optimize the individual for the good of the team. You usually don’t want only one person knowing the entire feature and while you will lose out on individual productivity, you can get features out sooner if you have more people working on it. On a personal level, I love having not to wait on other departments/props to get my work done especially in a dev environment.
- jzoch 7y ago
  What does that mean ? If you felt better and personally were prouder of the work done back in C with no autocomplete but the business was deriving more value from your work with autocomplete, how should One answer? Or more importantly, what if the requirements are so much more today that if you adopted the same tools as 20 years ago you’d fall behind? I admire those who stick with their old tools and forgo modern ones so they can stay sharp. They tend to miss the forest for the trees though.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I wasn’t implying one way or the other and I don’t think that the parent post was either. The point I was making that when I was writing C day in and day out and mostly just working with a combination of my own code and my companies vote libraries, it was easy to use just a text editor and the command line to build. But things have gotten more complicated since then. No one could be expected to know the hundreds of functions that make up the entire AWS SDK or all of the options that you need to specify for a typical CloudFormation stack in yml. Of course now it’s even better with the Cloud Developer Kit that lets you generate yml programmatically using a static language - with autocomplete.

tolmasky 7y ago

Not only this -- but it renders you quite useless if you ever have to use a different environment. Sometimes that's because you have to use a different language that doesn't have as much tooling, sometimes its because a product gets discontinued, or your employer forces a different IDE, etc. I definitely had this experience with CodeWarrior back in the day. I really loved that IDE. But then when Mac OS X came out and Objective-C became the native language, the tools weren't there yet, and I had to either program "alone" without autocomplete/fancy dynamic highlighting/etc, or use Project Builder (the predecessor to Xcode), which was lacking in all these departments. I found myself much slower, and not for the obvious reason of "of course, I'm missing all these great tools", but as you say, slower at things I knew I used to be fast at. It's kind of like discovering that no, you don't like broccoli, you actually just like the melted cheese on top. That was a big moment for me deciding to focus on generally applicable skills vs. IDE-specific skills. Interestingly enough, I think this legitimately doesn't apply to a lot of people because they spend most, if not all, their career in one domain. In that environment I think learning IDE-specific things makes a lot of sense. I discovered that this wasn't for me and move around a lot, so its nicer to not be dependent on those things.

scarface74 7y ago
Sometimes that's because you have to use a different language that doesn't have as much tooling, Which popular languages these days don’t have a dedicated IDE, plug ins for popular IDE’s and/or support for the language server protocol? sometimes its because a product gets discontinued, or your employer forces a different IDE, etc. I wouldn’t work for a company that forced an IDE on me. In that environment I think learning IDE-specific things makes a lot of sense. Visual Studio Code works with multiple languages as does Visual Studio.
- tolmasky 7y ago
  > Which popular languages these days don’t have a dedicated IDE, plug ins for popular IDE’s and/or support for the language server protocol? Most new languages until someone implements it. Again, this is very dependent on what you like to do. If you like trying bleeding edge stuff then you’ll probably run up against this. > I wouldn’t work for a company that forced an IDE on me. Sure, sometimes it’s kind of out of their control (or understandable). For example Xcode at Apple. Or if you work in a dev feature that needs to work with some tool or something. Again, my position is that it’s probably fine for most people. > Visual Studio Code works with multiple languages as does Visual Studio. OK, it’s interesting you bring up a fairly new entrant as proof this (at least I’m the Mac). Again, my interest is in trying lots of syntax extensions and stuff that usually just breaks these sorts of things. As I mentioned before, if you’re doing application development on a specific set of established languages for a very long time it’s probably the right move.

utxaa 7y ago

yeah. maybe that's why i get this feeling of being out of touch with software that was written with an IDE. you can see the difference come debugging time. C/Emacs you just know where everything is, just reading the logs (sans stack trace) is enough. Java/Eclipse ... you need to bring in the heavy machinery, and then good luck to you.

funcDropShadow 7y ago

> I gave up knowing things for relying on technology. Perhaps, it is not so much giving up knowledge but filling the first-level cache with other stuff, like the larger picture of the software you are developing or the ever growing number of abstraction layers below the code you are writing. And whether that is good or bad thing is an interesting question. I am not aware, that it has an definite answer, yet.