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My concern about PyCharm is that it's becoming the Microsoft Office of IDEs. I feel like there's more and more bullet points per release that are more marketing
by gdulli 12y ago
My concern about PyCharm is that it's becoming the Microsoft Office of IDEs. I feel like there's more and more bullet points per release that are more marketing-oriented than widely useful. While my needs remain simple. Maybe everyone needs only 2% of the feature set, and a different 2%, but we all have to pay for the bloat anyway.
I keep repeating a cycle where I try an IDE because it sounds interesting, but a few weeks later I find I'm spending a lot of time doing things like arranging tool windows, dismissing alerts, trying to figure out how to turn off or customize features. So I always go back to a simpler text editor that I've been using for 15+ years and does everything I need very well without the sluggishness of a feature-rich IDE.
For example, every time I open a PyCharm project I get an alert I need to dismiss that managing files will be slow because they're on a network drive. Technically it's a network drive but it's really mounted from a VM on my local machine, so no, it's not slow, and if it was I wouldn't need Clippy telling me so. There may or may not be a way to turn off this alert, but I shouldn't have to hunt for these things so often. I want to use PyCharm but keep getting annoyed with it.
- mseebach 12y agoIf your text editor works better than PyCharm, then by all means use that instead. However, the article is actually trying to make some point about what an IDE can do that text editors can't so perhaps you'd want to respond to that? > Maybe everyone needs only 2% of the feature set, and a different 2%, but we all have to pay for the bloat anyway. This is not a useful mental model for thinking about software. First, big doesn't equal bloated, and one thing my IntelliJ IDEA fanboy colleagues highlight is just how sleek, light weight and fast it is, especially compared with Eclipse (we're in Java land). Second, if everybody only uses 2% of the package, then basic price theory tells us that everybody is only paying for those 2%. (I think, in reality, the number is significantly higher, although I agree that probably nobody uses 100% of the features).
- xtrumanx 12y agoI think the OP has a point. I bought WebStorm (the javascript equivalent of PyCharm) last year and loved it. A couple of updates ago, it started exhibiting a strange behavior where the editor will hang for a few seconds while it loads up the intellisense which is annoying since I don't use intellisense all that much. Jetbrains' products are not immune from bloat.
- gdulli 12y agoThe everyone-uses-a-different-2% is a point that's frequently made about Microsoft Word, and it's not so much literal as a way of explaining why a product like that gets the way it does. If something is bloated, you can't just start removing obscure features because they're not obscure to everyone. So an IDE, also, can get into that state. Which is maybe why I can never find an IDE I like to use. I could only see calling PyCharm "sleek" if that was in comparison to something like Eclipse. It's a better choice than that, but still not the experience that it could be, or that I'm looking for.