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I use the same argument for IDEs versus fancy text editors like EMACS. Sure, you might prefer the specific keyboard shortcuts, but IDEs objectively make develop

I use the same argument for IDEs versus fancy text editors like EMACS. Sure, you might prefer the specific keyboard shortcuts, but IDEs objectively make developers more productive through features like source code integration, debuggers, and refactoring capabilities. Use whatever you like on your home projects, but at work you should be using whatever is most efficient.

mattacular 3y ago
> Use whatever you like on your home projects, but at work you should be using whatever is most efficient. Where's the incentive to do the latter?
kneebonian 3y ago
> fancy text editors like EMACS. Them fighting words my friend.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I knew mentioning EMACS would get the HN crowd riled up, that's the point. :) For laughs: Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc And to keep things fair and balanced, an Interview with a VIM Enthusiast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU "I actually wrote a vim versus IDE comparison. Do you know how much faster vim was? 4.3 seconds! 4.3 seconds I saved every day! All those months learning were totally worth it."
californical 3y ago
And interestingly, your argument also falls apart in the same way as the framework argument. It might make the average developer more productive on an average project. But most projects are not average, and neither are most developers. Everyone has some unique combination of strengths, just like every project has special cases that don’t fit within the box of a framework. A framework is great if you don’t know much about the domain and just want to get something together quickly. But if you’re working on anything novel, then eventually you’ll bump against the walls of the framework. Hopefully you designed the project in such a way that you can break out of the framework for these inevitable special cases. And I like frameworks! I’ve used a few in various languages and think they do a good job organizing the code for the basic cases. But every professional project I’ve worked on has eventually been trapped by piling workarounds on top of the framework to make it work for some unsupported or complex case, or an inevitable architecture fail which the framework has not considered an escape hatch for. Just like developers and their tools. I have an IDE and nvim at work. The IDE has a lot of power for major refactoring and hinting features, and it’s reasonable enough for an untrained dev. But it is very slow for the other 99.8% of my job where I’m not doing a big “find and rename all instances”. I am usually wading through a large project and jumping between files to try to understand a complex system. Once I understand it, I’m jumping between those files again to make my changes. All of that is much faster in a lightweight editor than an IDE. But I still open up the IDE every now and then to double-check some change that I made, or do those big fancy refactors.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > But most projects are not average I call bullshit. Most projects are average by definition. Otherwise that wouldn’t be the average.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - swores 3y ago
    You could argue that it's specifically true for projects, but the definition of average absolutely doesn't require that. If for example you had 100 projects were 50 of them were built by expert teams who poured love into their work, and 50 were made by 12 year olds who spent one day on their projects before giving up, the "average" quality of the 100 would be a long way from either the great or the shit products. Likewise if a group of ten people has five CEOs earning a million a year, and five waiters earning minimum wage including tips, none of the ten are "by definition" earning half a million a year. Of course in my data sets there is a kind of "normal distribution" such that most objects are near the mean, but that needs to be found out not assumed. I have no idea how many tech products are near the mean as opposed to near one extreme or the other, and doubt anyone could guess without bias and without actually researching the question.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      I have a fairly high confidence it’s normally distributed. Of course me having confidence doesn’t really mean anything, but I’ll work off that assumption anyway.
      - swores 3y ago
        I think you're probably right, was just pointing out that the definition doesn't mean that has to be the case :)
        Aeolun 3y ago
raincole 3y ago
It's a really weird sentence. I think most people would consider IDEs are the "fancy" ones, compared to emacs. I have to read your comment 3 times to ensure I didn't read it wrong. Plus the comparison doesn't work at all. When you use your home-made framework to solve a common problem, you make it harder to maintain for others. When you use emacs you use emacs. Emacs and IDEs are tools, but frameworks and libraries (and programming languages) are not merely tools. They're tools AND raw materials.

mattacular 3y ago

> Use whatever you like on your home projects, but at work you should be using whatever is most efficient. Where's the incentive to do the latter?

kneebonian 3y ago

> fancy text editors like EMACS. Them fighting words my friend.

jiggawatts 3y ago
I knew mentioning EMACS would get the HN crowd riled up, that's the point. :) For laughs: Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc And to keep things fair and balanced, an Interview with a VIM Enthusiast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1dtmzqnCU "I actually wrote a vim versus IDE comparison. Do you know how much faster vim was? 4.3 seconds! 4.3 seconds I saved every day! All those months learning were totally worth it."

californical 3y ago

And interestingly, your argument also falls apart in the same way as the framework argument. It might make the average developer more productive on an average project. But most projects are not average, and neither are most developers. Everyone has some unique combination of strengths, just like every project has special cases that don’t fit within the box of a framework. A framework is great if you don’t know much about the domain and just want to get something together quickly. But if you’re working on anything novel, then eventually you’ll bump against the walls of the framework. Hopefully you designed the project in such a way that you can break out of the framework for these inevitable special cases. And I like frameworks! I’ve used a few in various languages and think they do a good job organizing the code for the basic cases. But every professional project I’ve worked on has eventually been trapped by piling workarounds on top of the framework to make it work for some unsupported or complex case, or an inevitable architecture fail which the framework has not considered an escape hatch for. Just like developers and their tools. I have an IDE and nvim at work. The IDE has a lot of power for major refactoring and hinting features, and it’s reasonable enough for an untrained dev. But it is very slow for the other 99.8% of my job where I’m not doing a big “find and rename all instances”. I am usually wading through a large project and jumping between files to try to understand a complex system. Once I understand it, I’m jumping between those files again to make my changes. All of that is much faster in a lightweight editor than an IDE. But I still open up the IDE every now and then to double-check some change that I made, or do those big fancy refactors.

Aeolun 3y ago
> But most projects are not average I call bullshit. Most projects are average by definition. Otherwise that wouldn’t be the average.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- swores 3y ago
  You could argue that it's specifically true for projects, but the definition of average absolutely doesn't require that. If for example you had 100 projects were 50 of them were built by expert teams who poured love into their work, and 50 were made by 12 year olds who spent one day on their projects before giving up, the "average" quality of the 100 would be a long way from either the great or the shit products. Likewise if a group of ten people has five CEOs earning a million a year, and five waiters earning minimum wage including tips, none of the ten are "by definition" earning half a million a year. Of course in my data sets there is a kind of "normal distribution" such that most objects are near the mean, but that needs to be found out not assumed. I have no idea how many tech products are near the mean as opposed to near one extreme or the other, and doubt anyone could guess without bias and without actually researching the question.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I have a fairly high confidence it’s normally distributed. Of course me having confidence doesn’t really mean anything, but I’ll work off that assumption anyway.
    - swores 3y ago
      I think you're probably right, was just pointing out that the definition doesn't mean that has to be the case :)
      - Aeolun 3y ago

raincole 3y ago

It's a really weird sentence. I think most people would consider IDEs are the "fancy" ones, compared to emacs. I have to read your comment 3 times to ensure I didn't read it wrong. Plus the comparison doesn't work at all. When you use your home-made framework to solve a common problem, you make it harder to maintain for others. When you use emacs you use emacs. Emacs and IDEs are tools, but frameworks and libraries (and programming languages) are not merely tools. They're tools AND raw materials.