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The split-brain of HN: 1. We dream of the tools Bret Victor is teasing us with. 2. We code in heavily customized emacs / vi. 3. We bash IDEs. I'm not sure what

by pacala 14y ago

The split-brain of HN: 1. We dream of the tools Bret Victor is teasing us with. 2. We code in heavily customized emacs / vi. 3. We bash IDEs. I'm not sure what the point of the article is. We should not develop tools to aid large scale programming? The one and only tool is the raw text editor? Reading between the lines, it appears the IDEs he's using aren't adding features fast enough to support his favorite language. Perhaps the smell is that his favorite language is too complicated and/or unstable to be suitable for tool development?

beatgammit 14y ago
I'm in camp 2, but I used to be in comp 1. Having worked in a large C++/C# project, and with large Java projects, I can say that a good IDE partially makes up for missing documentation. If there isn't documentation for a library, at least the IDE tells me what the parameters are, from which I can deduce how I can use it. However, I have found that by not having an IDE, I spend more time documenting and understanding the code I write and less time relying on the IDE to tell me what I meant by a function or a class. I think about implementation details more because it's not as easy to just "refactor it later". This pays off when my boss calls me when I'm on vacation saying there's a huge bug in the production code on our website. Since I understand the code pretty well, I can just SSH in, find the code in question, and hot-fix it, all without needing an IDE. If it's a compiled thing, ssh in, write a unit-test, apply patch, run and test. If it passes, it can't be any worse than before, so I ship him a binary to verify the problem is gone, and push an update. I can do all of this without needing to bring my work laptop on vacation with me, because I can have my customized vim on the server. Also, I don't feel that I'm any less productive than someone with an IDE. When I switched to VIM, I was very unproductive. I kept making simple mistakes, because I was so used to the IDE fixing things for me. However, once I got used to it, I was able to write code as efficiently (if not more efficiently) than with an IDE. But there is a noticeable learning curve. If you can show me an IDE I can use when I ssh in from a beach in Hawaii on my wife's personal laptop, then maybe I'll consider switching. But for now, VIM is enough of an IDE for me.

by pacala 14y ago

beatgammit 14y ago

I'm in camp 2, but I used to be in comp 1. Having worked in a large C++/C# project, and with large Java projects, I can say that a good IDE partially makes up for missing documentation. If there isn't documentation for a library, at least the IDE tells me what the parameters are, from which I can deduce how I can use it. However, I have found that by not having an IDE, I spend more time documenting and understanding the code I write and less time relying on the IDE to tell me what I meant by a function or a class. I think about implementation details more because it's not as easy to just "refactor it later". This pays off when my boss calls me when I'm on vacation saying there's a huge bug in the production code on our website. Since I understand the code pretty well, I can just SSH in, find the code in question, and hot-fix it, all without needing an IDE. If it's a compiled thing, ssh in, write a unit-test, apply patch, run and test. If it passes, it can't be any worse than before, so I ship him a binary to verify the problem is gone, and push an update. I can do all of this without needing to bring my work laptop on vacation with me, because I can have my customized vim on the server. Also, I don't feel that I'm any less productive than someone with an IDE. When I switched to VIM, I was very unproductive. I kept making simple mistakes, because I was so used to the IDE fixing things for me. However, once I got used to it, I was able to write code as efficiently (if not more efficiently) than with an IDE. But there is a noticeable learning curve. If you can show me an IDE I can use when I ssh in from a beach in Hawaii on my wife's personal laptop, then maybe I'll consider switching. But for now, VIM is enough of an IDE for me.