4 ms·

VSCode is not an IDE, it's an extensible text editor. IDEs are integrated (it's in the name) and get developed as a whole. I'm 99% certain that if you were forc

VSCode is not an IDE, it's an extensible text editor. IDEs are integrated (it's in the name) and get developed as a whole. I'm 99% certain that if you were forced to spend a couple of months in a real IDE (like IDEA or Rider), you would not want to go back to vim, or any other text editor. Speaking as a long time user of both.

gregjor 2y ago
I get your point, but VSCode does far more than text editing. The line between an advanced editor and an IDE gets blurry. If you look at the Wikipedia page about IDEs[1] you see that VSCode ticks off more boxes than not. It has integration with source code control, refactoring, a debugger, etc. With the right combination of extensions it gets really close to an IDE as strictly defined. These days advanced text editor vs. "real" IDE seems more like a distinction without much of a difference. You may feel 99% certain, but you got it wrong. I have quite a bit of experience with IDEs, you shouldn't assume I use vim out of ignorance. I have worked as a programmer for 40+ years, with development tools (integrated or not) that I have forgotten the names of. That includes "real" IDEs like Visual Studio, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Symantec Think C, MPW, Oracle SQL Developer, Turbo Pascal, XCode, etc. and so on. When I started programming every mainframe and minicomputer came with an IDE for the platform. Unix came along with the tools broken out after I had worked for several years. In high school I learned programming on an HP-2000 BASIC minicomputer -- an IDE. So I have spent more than "a couple of months in real IDEs" and I still use vim day to day. If I went back to C++ or C# for Windows I would use Visual Studio, but I don't do that anymore. For the kind of work I do now vim + ctags + ripgrep (and awk, sed, bash, etc.) get my work done. At my very first real job I used PWB/Unix[2] -- PWB means Programmer's Work Bench -- an IDE of sorts. I still use the same tools (on Linux) because they work and I can always count on finding a large subset of them on any server I have to work with. I don't dislike or mean to crap on IDEs. I have used my share of IDEs and would again if the work called for that. I get what I need from the tools I've chosen, other people make different choices, no perfect language, editor, IDE, what have you exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX
- mgsouth 2y ago
  What IDE existed for the HP 2000? (Where I learned, too. In Portland :)
  - gregjor 2y ago
    Me too -- in Portland, Cleveland HS, mid-70s. The HP 2000 [1] had a timeshared BASIC system that the school district made available to schools, over ASR-33 teletypes with dial-up modems. The BASIC system could edit, run (translate to byte code and execute), manage files. No version control or debuggers back then. The HP 2000 had another layer of of the operating system accessible to administrators (the A000 account if I remember right) but it was the same timeshared BASIC system with some additional commands for managing user accounts and files. No one familiar with modern IDEs would recognize the HP 2000 BASIC system as an IDE, but it was self-contained and fully integrated around writing BASIC programs. HP also offered FORTRAN for it but not under the timeshared BASIC system. A friend wrote an assembler (in BASIC!) and taking advantage of a glitch in the bytecode interpreter we could load and run programs written in assembly language. After high school I got a job as night computer operator with the Multnomah County ESD (school district) so I had admin access to the HP 2000, and their two HP 3000 systems, and an IBM computer they used for crunching class registrations. Good times. Someone had an emulator online for a while, accessible over telnet, but I can't find it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC
    - kragen 2y ago
      i think it's very reasonable to describe time-shared basic systems like that as ides. the paradigmatic example of an 'ide' is probably turbo pascal 1.0, and of the features that separated turbo pascal from 'unintegrated' editor/compiler/assembler/linker/debugger setups, i think the dartmouth timesharing system falls mostly on the 'ide' side of the line. you could stop your program at any point and inspect its variables, change them, evaluate expressions, change the source code, and continue execution. runtime errors would also pop you into the interactive basic prompt where you could do all those things. i believe the hp 2000 timesharing basic had all these features, too
kelnos 2y ago
I think you're arguing semantics here in a way that's not particularly productive. VSCode can be set up in a way that is nearly as featureful as an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, and the default configuration and OOB experience pushes you hard in that direction. VSCode is designed for software development, not as a general text editor; I would never open up VSCode to edit a configuration file or type up a text file of notes, for example. Something like vim is designed as a general text-editing tool. Sure, you can load it up with plugins and scripts that give you a bunch of features you'd find in an IDE, but the experience is not the same, and the "integrated" bit of "IDE" is still just not there. (And I say this as someone who does most of his coding in vim, with LSP plugins installed, only reaching for a "proper" IDE for Java and Scala.) One metric I would use: if I can sit down at a random co-worker's desk and feel more or less at home in their editor of choice, then it's probably an IDE that has reasonable defaults and is geared for software development. IDEA and VSCode would qualify... vim would certainly not.
- chipsrafferty 2y ago
  What do you use as a general text editor then? I use vscode, having shortcuts like Ctrl+X, Ctrl+D are super useful.

gregjor 2y ago

I get your point, but VSCode does far more than text editing. The line between an advanced editor and an IDE gets blurry. If you look at the Wikipedia page about IDEs[1] you see that VSCode ticks off more boxes than not. It has integration with source code control, refactoring, a debugger, etc. With the right combination of extensions it gets really close to an IDE as strictly defined. These days advanced text editor vs. "real" IDE seems more like a distinction without much of a difference. You may feel 99% certain, but you got it wrong. I have quite a bit of experience with IDEs, you shouldn't assume I use vim out of ignorance. I have worked as a programmer for 40+ years, with development tools (integrated or not) that I have forgotten the names of. That includes "real" IDEs like Visual Studio, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, Symantec Think C, MPW, Oracle SQL Developer, Turbo Pascal, XCode, etc. and so on. When I started programming every mainframe and minicomputer came with an IDE for the platform. Unix came along with the tools broken out after I had worked for several years. In high school I learned programming on an HP-2000 BASIC minicomputer -- an IDE. So I have spent more than "a couple of months in real IDEs" and I still use vim day to day. If I went back to C++ or C# for Windows I would use Visual Studio, but I don't do that anymore. For the kind of work I do now vim + ctags + ripgrep (and awk, sed, bash, etc.) get my work done. At my very first real job I used PWB/Unix[2] -- PWB means Programmer's Work Bench -- an IDE of sorts. I still use the same tools (on Linux) because they work and I can always count on finding a large subset of them on any server I have to work with. I don't dislike or mean to crap on IDEs. I have used my share of IDEs and would again if the work called for that. I get what I need from the tools I've chosen, other people make different choices, no perfect language, editor, IDE, what have you exists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

mgsouth 2y ago
What IDE existed for the HP 2000? (Where I learned, too. In Portland :)
- gregjor 2y ago
  Me too -- in Portland, Cleveland HS, mid-70s. The HP 2000 [1] had a timeshared BASIC system that the school district made available to schools, over ASR-33 teletypes with dial-up modems. The BASIC system could edit, run (translate to byte code and execute), manage files. No version control or debuggers back then. The HP 2000 had another layer of of the operating system accessible to administrators (the A000 account if I remember right) but it was the same timeshared BASIC system with some additional commands for managing user accounts and files. No one familiar with modern IDEs would recognize the HP 2000 BASIC system as an IDE, but it was self-contained and fully integrated around writing BASIC programs. HP also offered FORTRAN for it but not under the timeshared BASIC system. A friend wrote an assembler (in BASIC!) and taking advantage of a glitch in the bytecode interpreter we could load and run programs written in assembly language. After high school I got a job as night computer operator with the Multnomah County ESD (school district) so I had admin access to the HP 2000, and their two HP 3000 systems, and an IBM computer they used for crunching class registrations. Good times. Someone had an emulator online for a while, accessible over telnet, but I can't find it now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Time-Shared_BASIC
  - kragen 2y ago
    i think it's very reasonable to describe time-shared basic systems like that as ides. the paradigmatic example of an 'ide' is probably turbo pascal 1.0, and of the features that separated turbo pascal from 'unintegrated' editor/compiler/assembler/linker/debugger setups, i think the dartmouth timesharing system falls mostly on the 'ide' side of the line. you could stop your program at any point and inspect its variables, change them, evaluate expressions, change the source code, and continue execution. runtime errors would also pop you into the interactive basic prompt where you could do all those things. i believe the hp 2000 timesharing basic had all these features, too

kelnos 2y ago

I think you're arguing semantics here in a way that's not particularly productive. VSCode can be set up in a way that is nearly as featureful as an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, and the default configuration and OOB experience pushes you hard in that direction. VSCode is designed for software development, not as a general text editor; I would never open up VSCode to edit a configuration file or type up a text file of notes, for example. Something like vim is designed as a general text-editing tool. Sure, you can load it up with plugins and scripts that give you a bunch of features you'd find in an IDE, but the experience is not the same, and the "integrated" bit of "IDE" is still just not there. (And I say this as someone who does most of his coding in vim, with LSP plugins installed, only reaching for a "proper" IDE for Java and Scala.) One metric I would use: if I can sit down at a random co-worker's desk and feel more or less at home in their editor of choice, then it's probably an IDE that has reasonable defaults and is geared for software development. IDEA and VSCode would qualify... vim would certainly not.

chipsrafferty 2y ago
What do you use as a general text editor then? I use vscode, having shortcuts like Ctrl+X, Ctrl+D are super useful.