4 ms·

Good points. Though if you've picked up computing from almost the ground up (soldering, hardware hacking, low-level programming, of which I did only a little ho

Good points. Though if you've picked up computing from almost the ground up (soldering, hardware hacking, low-level programming, of which I did only a little however), there's that experience when sitting in front of an overwhelming, notebook-melting IDE where you say to yourself "I don't need all those arbitrary abstractions; I've got a pretty good understanding of what I want to achieve, thank you very much" and realize the cognitive overhead can become a net-negative compared to the perceived problems that modern IDEs are attempting to solve. Matter of taste, of course. As to XML, matched end-element tags (if that's what you mean) actually were a simplification compared to SGML from which XML was derived/subset. In SGML, you can omit/infer end-element tags or can type "</>" to make SGML auto-close the most recent element. I agree the verbose-ness of XML looks especially redundant since it's always the most recent element you have to close anyway whereas SGML (in principle, at least) has overlapping ("concurrent") markup. And I can assure you that around 1998 we had 32bit color monitors and IDEs didn't look all that different from today ;) But back to the topic, I believe a lot of material has simply vanished from the 'net, or isn't accessible through search engines anymore.

tharkun__ 6y ago
IDEs and languages that an IDE can exploit are awesome. Especially if you don't really have such a good idea of a project (yet). It helps architects or contractors tremendously (as examples of people that might jump from one code base to another quite frequently). What I mean is that I personally really like statically typed languages like Java and compile time safety. I even like some of 'verboseness' that people always complain about. I can take a modern IDE and a Java project that hasn't replaced everything with runtime magic yet (Spring comes to mind) and I can simply click my way through things to get the info I need and/or to build a mental model. However, I don't need a finished mental model already just to be effective at every task. Also refactorings that are really braindead simple and that you don't even have to think about are possible, precisely because they're simple and guaranteed to be correct. Contrast that with other languages, such as Javascript, Python, Perl (yeah mentioning that because I loved Perl back when I was doing almost exclusively Perl - with a bit of shell scripting and lots of SQL - at my first 'real' job), where you have to have a mental model already and you have to know certain 'magic' to even be able to search for all the right things. Something that stuck in my head in that regard was AngularJS. I forgot the specifics but some type of identifier was use underscores in one place but dashes in another. How the eff am I supposed to find things easily? I have to know that magic conversion and grep for it specifically. If I come to a FE project written in Angular and have never done Angular, I will not find anything whatsoever and I have zero chance but to learn Angular to do basic things. And coming back to refactorings, even a simple rename can be a pain in the rear to do (and you won't do it and be stuck with really bad naming) because you can't be certain that you found all the right places to change until runtime i.e. your 2 a.m. batch run failed and you have users screaming at you. That teaches you to just stick with bad naming real fast. Good languages and frameworks, if you ask me, allow someone that is senior in his role but a total noob with the specific language or framework to look at existing code and easily make certain modifications. I wrote a simple T-SQL (Sybase, not MS-SQL) parser that output graphviz format to get a call graph of some backend job we had that consisted of a gazillion individual stored procedures strewn across a gazillion files and printed that and hung it up on the wall, just to be able to easily navigate that thing. Queue IDE where you just Ctrl-Click for the same end result.

tharkun__ 6y ago

IDEs and languages that an IDE can exploit are awesome. Especially if you don't really have such a good idea of a project (yet). It helps architects or contractors tremendously (as examples of people that might jump from one code base to another quite frequently). What I mean is that I personally really like statically typed languages like Java and compile time safety. I even like some of 'verboseness' that people always complain about. I can take a modern IDE and a Java project that hasn't replaced everything with runtime magic yet (Spring comes to mind) and I can simply click my way through things to get the info I need and/or to build a mental model. However, I don't need a finished mental model already just to be effective at every task. Also refactorings that are really braindead simple and that you don't even have to think about are possible, precisely because they're simple and guaranteed to be correct. Contrast that with other languages, such as Javascript, Python, Perl (yeah mentioning that because I loved Perl back when I was doing almost exclusively Perl - with a bit of shell scripting and lots of SQL - at my first 'real' job), where you have to have a mental model already and you have to know certain 'magic' to even be able to search for all the right things. Something that stuck in my head in that regard was AngularJS. I forgot the specifics but some type of identifier was use underscores in one place but dashes in another. How the eff am I supposed to find things easily? I have to know that magic conversion and grep for it specifically. If I come to a FE project written in Angular and have never done Angular, I will not find anything whatsoever and I have zero chance but to learn Angular to do basic things. And coming back to refactorings, even a simple rename can be a pain in the rear to do (and you won't do it and be stuck with really bad naming) because you can't be certain that you found all the right places to change until runtime i.e. your 2 a.m. batch run failed and you have users screaming at you. That teaches you to just stick with bad naming real fast. Good languages and frameworks, if you ask me, allow someone that is senior in his role but a total noob with the specific language or framework to look at existing code and easily make certain modifications. I wrote a simple T-SQL (Sybase, not MS-SQL) parser that output graphviz format to get a call graph of some backend job we had that consisted of a gazillion individual stored procedures strewn across a gazillion files and printed that and hung it up on the wall, just to be able to easily navigate that thing. Queue IDE where you just Ctrl-Click for the same end result.