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> the other you'd forgive for a few minutes of loading. No I wouldn't. What features do IDEs have which makes "a few minutes" a forgivable startup time (which

> the other you'd forgive for a few minutes of loading. No I wouldn't. What features do IDEs have which makes "a few minutes" a forgivable startup time (which I'll arbitrarily define as "time until key presses cause characters to show up on screen") Especially in a world where Web apps are "slow" if they take a few seconds to load, and a bunch of work is going into replacing OS init systems to get their boot times under 10 seconds. I didn't forgive Eclipse and Netbeans for their slugishness and bloat (they're the only programs I've seen with progress bars for exiting!). I've since switched to Emacs, which straddles the divide between text-editor, IDE and operating system. Even loaded with extensions, written in LISP, running in a single thread, it loads in a few seconds.

apalmer 12y ago
I think his point is that if you were the type of developer who uses an IDE, you are willing to accept the slow start up time. You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy. Some tools take a while to warm up, use them or don't.
- dagw 12y ago
  As a regular IDE user (Visual Studio, PyCharm, WebStorm) there is no way I would forgive a few minutes loading time. Of the IDEs I use PyCharm is the slowest at perhaps 15-20 seconds to start up, and I consider that barely acceptable. Had it not been such a great product once started up I doubt I'd be as forgiving about its start up time as I am.
- StavrosK 12y ago
  I am the type of developer who uses an IDE. The problem is that I would usually get my work done in Vim while waiting for the IDE to load. After a few instances of finding myself working in Vim with Eclipse loaded and idle in the background, I just stopped opening Eclipse altogether.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  > You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy. I'm pretty happy in Emacs. I'm not happy with false dichotomies, like this features/speed tradeoff. There is a real tradeoff to be made between those, but nowhere near the level I've seen in IDEs. Many problems seem to depend on the way modules/extensions are implemented. For example, we could implement plugins by allowing event listeners which can run arbitrary, imperative code. However, this leads to redundant computation (multiple "get(foo);" and "set(foo, bar)" calls spread across listeners), increases the chance of plugins conflicting due to race conditions, requiring very conservative scheduling, etc. An alternative, like a hook/advice system, would have the core performing gets/sets exactly when they're needed, but give plugins the ability to override the return values using hooks (like a dynamic form of decorators). This avoids the redundancy, race conditions and scheduling issues.
Igglyboo 12y ago
Yea a few minutes is ridiculous. IntelliJ takes max 30s for me to start and it's pretty heavy, I can't imagine waiting more than a whole minute. That's just unacceptable.
- treehau5 12y ago
  Not to sound like a plug for Jetbrains, but for everything IntelliJ does, I find it incredible that it loads so quickly, and the experience is pretty much fluid. VS2008-2013, Eclipse, Netbeans, Qt Creator and others all seem like pigs compared to IntelliJ. The thing that really blew me away and made me a true convert was the jruby+ruby support, and the jruby step-through debugger
  - mercurial 12y ago
    I don't know, VS loads pretty quickly and is generally fluid, though it has its shortcomings. Eclipse on the other hand starts up the same way it behaves: slowly. It's much more full-featured than VS or Qt Creator though (at least last time I tried it).
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  IntelliJ probably manages to do a lot more stuff in the background than its competitors do. I'd argue that concurrency / asynchronicity in large Java applications like that is very complicated, moreso than Javascript-based applications like Atom - so props to Jetbrains for that.

apalmer 12y ago

I think his point is that if you were the type of developer who uses an IDE, you are willing to accept the slow start up time. You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy. Some tools take a while to warm up, use them or don't.

dagw 12y ago
As a regular IDE user (Visual Studio, PyCharm, WebStorm) there is no way I would forgive a few minutes loading time. Of the IDEs I use PyCharm is the slowest at perhaps 15-20 seconds to start up, and I consider that barely acceptable. Had it not been such a great product once started up I doubt I'd be as forgiving about its start up time as I am.
StavrosK 12y ago
I am the type of developer who uses an IDE. The problem is that I would usually get my work done in Vim while waiting for the IDE to load. After a few instances of finding myself working in Vim with Eclipse loaded and idle in the background, I just stopped opening Eclipse altogether.
chriswarbo 12y ago
> You clearly are not willing to deal with that, and as such are not ever going to be happy. I'm pretty happy in Emacs. I'm not happy with false dichotomies, like this features/speed tradeoff. There is a real tradeoff to be made between those, but nowhere near the level I've seen in IDEs. Many problems seem to depend on the way modules/extensions are implemented. For example, we could implement plugins by allowing event listeners which can run arbitrary, imperative code. However, this leads to redundant computation (multiple "get(foo);" and "set(foo, bar)" calls spread across listeners), increases the chance of plugins conflicting due to race conditions, requiring very conservative scheduling, etc. An alternative, like a hook/advice system, would have the core performing gets/sets exactly when they're needed, but give plugins the ability to override the return values using hooks (like a dynamic form of decorators). This avoids the redundancy, race conditions and scheduling issues.

Igglyboo 12y ago

Yea a few minutes is ridiculous. IntelliJ takes max 30s for me to start and it's pretty heavy, I can't imagine waiting more than a whole minute. That's just unacceptable.

treehau5 12y ago
Not to sound like a plug for Jetbrains, but for everything IntelliJ does, I find it incredible that it loads so quickly, and the experience is pretty much fluid. VS2008-2013, Eclipse, Netbeans, Qt Creator and others all seem like pigs compared to IntelliJ. The thing that really blew me away and made me a true convert was the jruby+ruby support, and the jruby step-through debugger
- mercurial 12y ago
  I don't know, VS loads pretty quickly and is generally fluid, though it has its shortcomings. Eclipse on the other hand starts up the same way it behaves: slowly. It's much more full-featured than VS or Qt Creator though (at least last time I tried it).
Cthulhu_ 12y ago
IntelliJ probably manages to do a lot more stuff in the background than its competitors do. I'd argue that concurrency / asynchronicity in large Java applications like that is very complicated, moreso than Javascript-based applications like Atom - so props to Jetbrains for that.