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If we're talking about professional tools i'm not sure if setting it up as fast as possible is the best productivity comparison. All good tools need getting to

If we're talking about professional tools i'm not sure if setting it up as fast as possible is the best productivity comparison. All good tools need getting to know them, and setting things up yourself (eg. in vim) means you also know how to fix any issues that pop up in the future. Installing a vscode plugin for playing around is great, but it doesn't automatically make you a professional and stable production environment.

p-e-w 4y ago
> All good tools need getting to know them Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival. Great tools are obvious in their base functionality and have optional additional layers that can be discovered if necessary. When you have to search the web to find out how to close the editor you just opened, because it works differently than every other program running on your system, you know you're using a bad tool.
- zopa 4y ago
  Step inside a woodworking- or machine shop sometime and see how many of tools there you can instantly use with proficiency, with no instruction. (Please stand back from the table saws while trying this experiment.) It’s wonderful and beautiful that we can get real work done with a heavy thing on a stick, but pretending every tool can be as simple as a hammer is not really arguing in good faith.
- quanticle 4y ago
  >Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival. You mean like a nail gun? The kind that all professional roofers use?
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    Does one need to "get to know a nail gun first" to use it well?
    - progman32 4y ago
      Considering that nails from a nail gun have a habit of following the grain in surprising ways (possibly causing the nail to do a 180 degree turn and find your finger), yes, it is important for a prospective user to "get to know it".
- a2800276 4y ago
  There are more complex problems than "nail" requiring more complex tools than "hammer". And even the hammer metaphor falls apart pretty quickly: compressor driven nail guns are commonly used. VSCode is obviously has something going for it, else so many people wouldn't be using it. Vi and Emacs are also extremely popular and have been for decades.
- jjav 4y ago
  > > All good tools need getting to know them > Wrong. Good tools don't require that. No, good tools absolutely require learning how to use them. To think that they don't is a maddening take because it has led to the infantilization of applications in so many areas of the software world. There is definitely a place for simplistic tools that have no customization, no configuration, a single limited way to do anything and no hooks/APIs to modify their internal behavior. Yes, such tools are easiest to pick up and casually use in the limited way they can be used and that's often all that is needed. But, the world also need professional tools. In the non-software world this is obvious and such tools exist in every profession. Even your hammer example is wrong as the sibling post noted, there are "professional hammers" (nail guns) that require a bit more care to use but are much better. There is a place for test lights (that anyone can touch to a wire to see if there's voltage). But we can also buy voltage meters of increasing complexity and capabilities. They start to require a little bit of understanding of volts and amps and ohms, but they are so much more useful. But yes you need to learn a little to use them. There are also things like oscilloscopes which an untrained person wouldn't stand a chance to know how to use at first sight. But of course they are vastly more useful once you learn the tool. Just one random example of thousands. Yes, good tools absolutely require training.
- Gud 4y ago
  This is completely wrong. Basic tools that solve basic tasks are easy to learn and understand. I use spectrum analyzers to identify partial discharges in high voltage equipment. Sometimes I use a hammer. One of them require deep knowledge, with the other one I just give the equipment a whack with to see where the fault lies.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  I’ve seen so many people use a hammer wrong. They don’t swing it effectively, hold it too high on the handle, or even use the wrong type of hammer for the job (yes, there are different types of hammers designed for different types of hammering). And that’s before you go into all the other technologies invented that are evolutions of the hammer, from nail guns to jackhammers.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  An operating theatre is filled with tools that require decades to master and years to learn to use originally. Even if you forget the surgeon's skill there is still the likes of ECMO (run full time by a perfusionist), EMG/NCS (an electrophysiologist) or the old classic, an anaesthetic machine (anaesthetist). Many of the UIs on these are, to the outside eye, downright janky.
- nocman 4y ago
  >> All good tools need getting to know them > Wrong. Good tools don't require that. So any tool that is complicated enough to use that it requires more than 5 minutes to understand can't be a good tool? That is just false. Obviously vim is not the tool for you (and emacs probably isn't either). You don't like the way they work, so don't use them. They are not bad tools. They are both very good tools. They are just not tools that fit your preferences. They do fit other people's preferences.
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  I wouldn't put it that blunt but I do agree. The problem are these nerds with seemingly infinite memory. It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us. I tried editing a txt document in vim one time. After gazing at the UI for much to long I had to ask for help because it wouldn't let me edit the txt. I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously. They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side. I could certainly learn some of vim's functionality but there would be very little disk space left to write the software. I'm seriously more productive using MS notepad or nano. I can totally see myself forget how to engage edit mode in a week or 2. I'm having visuals of picard ordering enterprise to engage All i need is a shuttle! The edit mode feels like a child safety feature where I'm the child. Human children flying Vulkan space ships, think about it. If non of this makes sense, that is the whole point.
  - modo_mario 4y ago
    >It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us. Have you considered that their tool is not necessarily made for you? You'd shudder at emacs yet there's still people there that really want it over vim and are more productive with it than most vim and vscode users. >I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously. it's 1 key. It's not intuitive by default tho that's very much true. >They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side. If you use a tool every day you're often expected to know a bit about it regardless of which one you use. The previous poster compared it to a hammer and someone else mentioned a nailgun. Similarly a an ax is simple but a chainsaw used more plenty by my father...but he knows how to replace and fix the chain, And even beyond that a nailgun and chainsaw are simple simple machines compared to the tooling you'll find in many workshops. If you processed wood professionally you'd use room filling machinery instead to make boatloads of planks and whatnot in no time. The thing is. Much of these issues one would encounter with em and things to know them are relatively simple and easy on their own... But seem difficult if you don't know. They're pretty easy to forget if you do it once. But if you've done it dozens of times you just know. Knowing these things doesn't impact the person's ability to learn other related things much. How a new kind of wood to cut behaves or whatever in the same way that remembering that new face and name doesn't obviously directly makes me forget my existing coworkers.
- mgaunard 4y ago
  You do realize there are huge mechanical hammers that do require training to use, right?
- kuratkull 4y ago
  Good tools usually have a beneficial tradeoff - it takes a minute or two to learn how to do it, but you have recurrent measureable gains in productivity after that. That includes closing Vim.
satvikpendem 4y ago
On the contrary, working in a professional environment, almost no one I know is using vim or Emacs seriously day to day for coding. We all use VSCode because that is a tool that just works for our team and company. Having a unified tool set works wonders for group productivity, no more messing around with some employees not having a certain package and others needing to customize their vim configs. No, everything simply works, and we can focus on the actual coding rather than messing around with our configs.
- thom 4y ago
  My experience of VSCode _is_ messing around with my config, but giving up and going back to a more mature editor because I could never get it to do what I wanted. I suppose capitulation was also an option, but I dislike the characterisation of tooling as something other than ‘actual coding’.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    That's very strange, when did you use it? And what config did you need? In our company there really isn't any config we mess around with, just download the language plug-ins and that's it. If someone wants to add more then that's fine but not required.
    - thom 4y ago
      I have a setup that I maintain and I pop back to it every six months or so. There are probably three classes of things that end up turning me off. 1) VSCode is very UI heavy and doesn’t allow consistent keyboard and text navigation. I want my text editor to be text-based, and it slows me down to have different types of windows (some of which seem impossible to hide permanently) with inconsistent forms of navigation. 2) The terminal window is its own thing, even if you open it in an editor window, which is then ignored by anything that interacts with the terminal. This is more what I want but is very limited and immature: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jeffgran.comint https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jeffgran... The lack of an infrastructure like Emacs comint mode also means there’s no good text-based database mode either. I want the same navigation, search and editing functions in every single window I have to interact with. 3) Where analogues to Emacs modes exist, they are universally less featureful, often because of fundamental limitations of the VSCode extension API. REPLs do less and offer less programmability. Edamagit is a fine and welcome effort but not as good as Magit. If people want an editor with a little bit of auto completion and some squiggly lines to tell them they’ve typed something wrong VSCode is great. I have many mostly happy VSCode users within my organisation. But I think every individual programmer, like every team, should have a regular little retrospectives with themselves. What work did I do today, what would have made it flow better? In every case, I can build that in Emacs, but it’s much more friction in VSCode. This is partly immaturity and partly the APIs not offering as much. Long term I’m rooting for VSCode because it’s snappy and has undeniable market share. But it’s never quite been there for me yet.

p-e-w 4y ago

> All good tools need getting to know them Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival. Great tools are obvious in their base functionality and have optional additional layers that can be discovered if necessary. When you have to search the web to find out how to close the editor you just opened, because it works differently than every other program running on your system, you know you're using a bad tool.

zopa 4y ago
Step inside a woodworking- or machine shop sometime and see how many of tools there you can instantly use with proficiency, with no instruction. (Please stand back from the table saws while trying this experiment.) It’s wonderful and beautiful that we can get real work done with a heavy thing on a stick, but pretending every tool can be as simple as a hammer is not really arguing in good faith.
quanticle 4y ago
>Wrong. Good tools don't require that. Imagine someone showed you a complicated mechanical contraption and told you "it's a type of hammer, much better than the 'non-professional' hammer, but you need to 'get to know it' first". That product would be dead on arrival. You mean like a nail gun? The kind that all professional roofers use?
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  Does one need to "get to know a nail gun first" to use it well?
  - progman32 4y ago
    Considering that nails from a nail gun have a habit of following the grain in surprising ways (possibly causing the nail to do a 180 degree turn and find your finger), yes, it is important for a prospective user to "get to know it".
a2800276 4y ago
There are more complex problems than "nail" requiring more complex tools than "hammer". And even the hammer metaphor falls apart pretty quickly: compressor driven nail guns are commonly used. VSCode is obviously has something going for it, else so many people wouldn't be using it. Vi and Emacs are also extremely popular and have been for decades.
jjav 4y ago
> > All good tools need getting to know them > Wrong. Good tools don't require that. No, good tools absolutely require learning how to use them. To think that they don't is a maddening take because it has led to the infantilization of applications in so many areas of the software world. There is definitely a place for simplistic tools that have no customization, no configuration, a single limited way to do anything and no hooks/APIs to modify their internal behavior. Yes, such tools are easiest to pick up and casually use in the limited way they can be used and that's often all that is needed. But, the world also need professional tools. In the non-software world this is obvious and such tools exist in every profession. Even your hammer example is wrong as the sibling post noted, there are "professional hammers" (nail guns) that require a bit more care to use but are much better. There is a place for test lights (that anyone can touch to a wire to see if there's voltage). But we can also buy voltage meters of increasing complexity and capabilities. They start to require a little bit of understanding of volts and amps and ohms, but they are so much more useful. But yes you need to learn a little to use them. There are also things like oscilloscopes which an untrained person wouldn't stand a chance to know how to use at first sight. But of course they are vastly more useful once you learn the tool. Just one random example of thousands. Yes, good tools absolutely require training.
Gud 4y ago
This is completely wrong. Basic tools that solve basic tasks are easy to learn and understand. I use spectrum analyzers to identify partial discharges in high voltage equipment. Sometimes I use a hammer. One of them require deep knowledge, with the other one I just give the equipment a whack with to see where the fault lies.
hnlmorg 4y ago
I’ve seen so many people use a hammer wrong. They don’t swing it effectively, hold it too high on the handle, or even use the wrong type of hammer for the job (yes, there are different types of hammers designed for different types of hammering). And that’s before you go into all the other technologies invented that are evolutions of the hammer, from nail guns to jackhammers.
azalemeth 4y ago
An operating theatre is filled with tools that require decades to master and years to learn to use originally. Even if you forget the surgeon's skill there is still the likes of ECMO (run full time by a perfusionist), EMG/NCS (an electrophysiologist) or the old classic, an anaesthetic machine (anaesthetist). Many of the UIs on these are, to the outside eye, downright janky.
nocman 4y ago
>> All good tools need getting to know them > Wrong. Good tools don't require that. So any tool that is complicated enough to use that it requires more than 5 minutes to understand can't be a good tool? That is just false. Obviously vim is not the tool for you (and emacs probably isn't either). You don't like the way they work, so don't use them. They are not bad tools. They are both very good tools. They are just not tools that fit your preferences. They do fit other people's preferences.
throwaway14356 4y ago
I wouldn't put it that blunt but I do agree. The problem are these nerds with seemingly infinite memory. It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us. I tried editing a txt document in vim one time. After gazing at the UI for much to long I had to ask for help because it wouldn't let me edit the txt. I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously. They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side. I could certainly learn some of vim's functionality but there would be very little disk space left to write the software. I'm seriously more productive using MS notepad or nano. I can totally see myself forget how to engage edit mode in a week or 2. I'm having visuals of picard ordering enterprise to engage All i need is a shuttle! The edit mode feels like a child safety feature where I'm the child. Human children flying Vulkan space ships, think about it. If non of this makes sense, that is the whole point.
- modo_mario 4y ago
  >It is almost impossible for them to make a UI for the rest of us. Have you considered that their tool is not necessarily made for you? You'd shudder at emacs yet there's still people there that really want it over vim and are more productive with it than most vim and vscode users. >I'm sure your average vim wizard can see no wrong in forcing new users to learn how to engage edit mode by pressing 12 keys simultaneously. it's 1 key. It's not intuitive by default tho that's very much true. >They simply dont get that our brains are like bookshelves that take only n books. If you push more than that onto the shelve other books are falling off on the other side. If you use a tool every day you're often expected to know a bit about it regardless of which one you use. The previous poster compared it to a hammer and someone else mentioned a nailgun. Similarly a an ax is simple but a chainsaw used more plenty by my father...but he knows how to replace and fix the chain, And even beyond that a nailgun and chainsaw are simple simple machines compared to the tooling you'll find in many workshops. If you processed wood professionally you'd use room filling machinery instead to make boatloads of planks and whatnot in no time. The thing is. Much of these issues one would encounter with em and things to know them are relatively simple and easy on their own... But seem difficult if you don't know. They're pretty easy to forget if you do it once. But if you've done it dozens of times you just know. Knowing these things doesn't impact the person's ability to learn other related things much. How a new kind of wood to cut behaves or whatever in the same way that remembering that new face and name doesn't obviously directly makes me forget my existing coworkers.
mgaunard 4y ago
You do realize there are huge mechanical hammers that do require training to use, right?
kuratkull 4y ago
Good tools usually have a beneficial tradeoff - it takes a minute or two to learn how to do it, but you have recurrent measureable gains in productivity after that. That includes closing Vim.

satvikpendem 4y ago

On the contrary, working in a professional environment, almost no one I know is using vim or Emacs seriously day to day for coding. We all use VSCode because that is a tool that just works for our team and company. Having a unified tool set works wonders for group productivity, no more messing around with some employees not having a certain package and others needing to customize their vim configs. No, everything simply works, and we can focus on the actual coding rather than messing around with our configs.

thom 4y ago
My experience of VSCode _is_ messing around with my config, but giving up and going back to a more mature editor because I could never get it to do what I wanted. I suppose capitulation was also an option, but I dislike the characterisation of tooling as something other than ‘actual coding’.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  That's very strange, when did you use it? And what config did you need? In our company there really isn't any config we mess around with, just download the language plug-ins and that's it. If someone wants to add more then that's fine but not required.
  - thom 4y ago
    I have a setup that I maintain and I pop back to it every six months or so. There are probably three classes of things that end up turning me off. 1) VSCode is very UI heavy and doesn’t allow consistent keyboard and text navigation. I want my text editor to be text-based, and it slows me down to have different types of windows (some of which seem impossible to hide permanently) with inconsistent forms of navigation. 2) The terminal window is its own thing, even if you open it in an editor window, which is then ignored by anything that interacts with the terminal. This is more what I want but is very limited and immature: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jeffgran.comint https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jeffgran... The lack of an infrastructure like Emacs comint mode also means there’s no good text-based database mode either. I want the same navigation, search and editing functions in every single window I have to interact with. 3) Where analogues to Emacs modes exist, they are universally less featureful, often because of fundamental limitations of the VSCode extension API. REPLs do less and offer less programmability. Edamagit is a fine and welcome effort but not as good as Magit. If people want an editor with a little bit of auto completion and some squiggly lines to tell them they’ve typed something wrong VSCode is great. I have many mostly happy VSCode users within my organisation. But I think every individual programmer, like every team, should have a regular little retrospectives with themselves. What work did I do today, what would have made it flow better? In every case, I can build that in Emacs, but it’s much more friction in VSCode. This is partly immaturity and partly the APIs not offering as much. Long term I’m rooting for VSCode because it’s snappy and has undeniable market share. But it’s never quite been there for me yet.