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For me the advantage of VSCode is in its approach and how it has differed from other products: - VSCode Remoting is really useful. It doesn’t suffer as much fr

by jchw 5y ago

For me the advantage of VSCode is in its approach and how it has differed from other products: - VSCode Remoting is really useful. It doesn’t suffer as much from latency as SSH or display forwarding, and lets you use some local configuration when remoting. Neovim will soon have a feature like this. - Language servers for code intelligence has greatly improved editor support for languages. Up until the introduction and adoption of LSP, which was practically an invention of VSCode, language support was significantly more hit-or-miss with most editors. Basically only IntelliJ IDEA could do similar code intelligence across many languages. Because of LSP though, more editors and more languages can participate in inline documentation, go to symbol, errors as you type, debugging, etc. for example, many people now use language servers with Vim, and you can see useful integrations for languages like Terraform/Hashicorp HCL. - The extensions ecosystem: it isn’t necessarily the greatest ever, but it is very solid. - Compared to many IDEs, it remains lightweight and fast to boot. Though I’m not complaining, (regular) Visual Studio and IntelliJ are too useful to ignore in some cases. - Unification: because it’s so versatile, across OSes, across runtimes, over remoting, over Code Spaces, you can buy into the ecosystem in your projects. You can tell Code Spaces what extensions to install and what commands to run, to try to build a nice environment. You can tell desktop VS Code what extensions are recommended, add workspace configuration to help improve the workflow. Users still can use other editors, and you can still include editor information for those editors too. But, for someone who just wants a good option to edit a specific project, pushing them towards VS Code is a really safe bet. To be clear it has some issues too: - There is no equally useable OSS version, as the Microsoft distribution has become more dependent on services and blobs. - It’s not as quick and responsive as something like Sublime Text or vim. … but honestly, I think it’s just great. If I was a new programmer again and I could jump right into projects and immediately begin working on them without having to figure out the rigmarole of version control, tool chains, build system and editor config, that would be amazing. For that reason I think Code Spaces and VSCode are net goods, though I think we ought not become too dependent on the specific solution. VSCode is never going to be the perfect editor for any specific use, but I believe overall it is usually a great editor.

nerdponx 5y ago
I get worried that VS Code is too popular, and that some higher ups might be tempted to go for an EEE play. The flipside is that MS pouring money into VS Code has tremendously benefited the entire code editor ecosystem, including (especially) FOSS editors that can reuse their language servers.
- hajile 5y ago
  Last I checked, most of the MS-owned language servers used proprietary licenses. An example is the Python language server https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release They base it 90% on the open-source pyright library. Then the lock down all their own enhancements. https://github.com/microsoft/pyright https://github.com/microsoft/pyright This is why MIT isn't always the correct choice. GPL wouldn't hurt devs at all and would protect from this kind of garbage from MS.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This is why MIT isn't always the correct choice. GPL wouldn't hurt devs at all and would protect from this kind of garbage from MS. But would it protect against Pylance existing, or would it just be more expensive to develop but still proprietary (and possibly not free-as-in-beer), or would it be Free? There's only one of those three where devs (as opposed to Free Software ideologues) win, and one where both lose. (And really, it would do none of those, since pyright is also owned by MS, so they could reuse it on any terms even if the owner [them] offered it to others only under GPL terms. All GPL would do is prevent someone else from competing with Pylance by taking pyright and building similar functionality on top, possibly with a still-Free license.)
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      I wish this point was brought up more often. Like in the TiVo case when everyone lost their minds about ideology, meanwhile millions of people got to watch what they wanted on their schedule and with no ads. This attitude of MIT being bad because it gives people freedom to do Bad Things™ really makes me question what open source is actually about (yes I know that it's complicated and means many things, that's not what I'm talking about here). It seems to me that some proponents of it really believe in it so they can tell other people what to do.

by jchw 5y ago

nerdponx 5y ago

I get worried that VS Code is too popular, and that some higher ups might be tempted to go for an EEE play. The flipside is that MS pouring money into VS Code has tremendously benefited the entire code editor ecosystem, including (especially) FOSS editors that can reuse their language servers.

hajile 5y ago
Last I checked, most of the MS-owned language servers used proprietary licenses. An example is the Python language server https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release They base it 90% on the open-source pyright library. Then the lock down all their own enhancements. https://github.com/microsoft/pyright https://github.com/microsoft/pyright This is why MIT isn't always the correct choice. GPL wouldn't hurt devs at all and would protect from this kind of garbage from MS.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This is why MIT isn't always the correct choice. GPL wouldn't hurt devs at all and would protect from this kind of garbage from MS. But would it protect against Pylance existing, or would it just be more expensive to develop but still proprietary (and possibly not free-as-in-beer), or would it be Free? There's only one of those three where devs (as opposed to Free Software ideologues) win, and one where both lose. (And really, it would do none of those, since pyright is also owned by MS, so they could reuse it on any terms even if the owner [them] offered it to others only under GPL terms. All GPL would do is prevent someone else from competing with Pylance by taking pyright and building similar functionality on top, possibly with a still-Free license.)
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    I wish this point was brought up more often. Like in the TiVo case when everyone lost their minds about ideology, meanwhile millions of people got to watch what they wanted on their schedule and with no ads. This attitude of MIT being bad because it gives people freedom to do Bad Things™ really makes me question what open source is actually about (yes I know that it's complicated and means many things, that's not what I'm talking about here). It seems to me that some proponents of it really believe in it so they can tell other people what to do.