4 ms·
Too much over-engineering here. It is always better to start with simple, dumb and reliable code, with minimal architecture, and then grow organically. With e
by stephc_int13 6y ago
Too much over-engineering here.
It is always better to start with simple, dumb and reliable code, with minimal architecture, and then grow organically.
With experience, I tend to write the less smart code possible, I felt in love with the power of brute-forcing everything.
- magicalist 6y ago> With experience, I tend to write the less smart code possible I'm always amused by the hn threads patting ourselves on the backs for in depth technical discussions[1], when so often the top comments are basically non-specific thought leader tweets. For those that got this far, the article is well worth reading about a design space with difficult tradeoffs, and there are comments actually engaging with the content below this. [1] today brings us multiple instances in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664067
- saagarjha 6y agoI found some interesting ones in this thread!
- microcolonel 6y agoThe thing is, that is the story of the existing big editors, and we know where that story goes.
- eeereerews 6y agoNo, where does it go? Are the big editors unsuccessful?
- microcolonel 6y agoThey are unscalable. I love Emacs, and it continues to be my editor of choice, but it doesn't seem the design is amenable to adding good threading primitives. NeoVIM seems like a success story in this regard, though VIMScript is a much less pleasant extension language than Elisp, which is not perfect, but is at least a real programming language. There may be a way forward for Emacs, building a sandbox that looks like a full Emacs instance to existing Elisp, and slowly factoring out the whole-editor blocking issues; but that might be almost as complicated as starting fresh, with fewer benefits.
- magicalist 6y ago> Are the big editors unsuccessful? No, but if that's the only criteria, we already have plenty of those.
- vbezhenar 6y agoMy first test of any text editor is to open something like 4-gigabytes log file with one gigabyte line. If editor works fast, it's good. So far very few editors pass this test, so most are not suitable for general use, only for some niche use like editing tiny text files.
- saagarjha 6y agoI am curious which editors pass this test, as pretty much everything I have tried chokes on long lines, even things like nano, vim, Sublime Text…
- stephc_int13 6y agoI read the previous comment as sarcasm...
- kzrdude 6y agoIt's still disappointing, and I'd totally understand if someone wanted to fix this. I think the pagers - less - is somewhat ok with long lines? Not much else that deals gracefully with multi megabyte lines.
- vbezhenar 6y agoI finally stopped on Windows EditPad, but it's shareware and its UI is somewhat weird, so I won't recommend it for everyone, but as a general text editor, it works for me.
- microcolonel 6y agoEmacs has made some major improvements with long lines in master, and some of that will come out with 27.
- fmakunbound 6y agoThat is a bizarre measure for a text editor.
- RMPR 6y ago
- akhilcacharya 6y agoPerhaps this is a cultural side effect?
- stephc_int13 6y agoYou mean working at Google or in the Android team? I've rarely seen a worse example of absurdly over-engineered code than the Android codebase...
- akhilcacharya 6y agoThe latter includes the former, so yes.
- mav3rick 6y agoLol clearly salty at not being at Google and comments about the "culture". Stick to Amazon where people don't get pee breaks or cry due to pressure or get fired for speaking their mind.
- noobermin 6y agoFrom the little of what I knew about Xi, I came in with this perspective. The article changed my mind. He really was trying to "fix all the problems" as it were, it's right there in the start of the article the issue with google keyboard not talking to text boxes, it's a problem that is real. That said, in his opinion, it didn't work especially with the gui being separate from the core. I guess my point is he was trying to "correctly solve" a hard problem, which does require engineering. He didn't seem to set out to solve a dumb problem that didn't need solving (Yet Another Text Editor).
- canofbars 6y agoWhat would be the point of building something that already exists?