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I was thinking in the same line. Emacs seems to be empowering while the Visual Studio, though is really good IDE, is kind of enslaving. More you use, more depen

by panjaro 12y ago

I was thinking in the same line. Emacs seems to be empowering while the Visual Studio, though is really good IDE, is kind of enslaving. More you use, more dependent on it. In other words, open source seems to be heuristic while closed source seems to provide set of instructions to perform certain tasks.

akkartik 12y ago
You're right that it's just a heuristic. Open source can also lead to cargo-culting[1] sets of instructions for tightly circumscribed tasks: http://akkartik.name/about http://akkartik.name/about [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
yzzxy 12y ago
This is totally true. There are a ton of things to criticize about VS, but I keep coming back to it because the autocomplete is perfect. It's so good! [0] Doing this in Emacs, etc, is possible. But it requires hours and hours of setup and maintenance. Whenever somebody tries to solve this issue by making "prepacked" Emacs config with batteries included (e.g. Prelude), people criticize it for causing compatibility issues and not training people to understand Emacs.[1] Guess what? I'm a hacker, not an IDE pilot. If I want to hack on my Emacs build, I want the ability to do so. But it shouldn't be anathema to use OSS configs you don't understand at the lowest level, because not everyone's goal needs to be knowing their IDE like he back of their hand. Getting people to accept this has the potential to push FOSS tools to the forefront of enterprise and the mainstream. Despite what you might think from the insular posts on HN, most coders don't use Vim and Emacs, or even the more "responsible" IDE. [1] I wonder if this is because of the API features of Roslyn. I don't use C# enough to have studies the compiler, but I've heard it's an amazing piece of engineering. [0] s/emacs/vim if you like, it applies just as well.

by panjaro 12y ago

akkartik 12y ago

You're right that it's just a heuristic. Open source can also lead to cargo-culting[1] sets of instructions for tightly circumscribed tasks: http://akkartik.name/about http://akkartik.name/about [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

yzzxy 12y ago

This is totally true. There are a ton of things to criticize about VS, but I keep coming back to it because the autocomplete is perfect. It's so good! [0] Doing this in Emacs, etc, is possible. But it requires hours and hours of setup and maintenance. Whenever somebody tries to solve this issue by making "prepacked" Emacs config with batteries included (e.g. Prelude), people criticize it for causing compatibility issues and not training people to understand Emacs.[1] Guess what? I'm a hacker, not an IDE pilot. If I want to hack on my Emacs build, I want the ability to do so. But it shouldn't be anathema to use OSS configs you don't understand at the lowest level, because not everyone's goal needs to be knowing their IDE like he back of their hand. Getting people to accept this has the potential to push FOSS tools to the forefront of enterprise and the mainstream. Despite what you might think from the insular posts on HN, most coders don't use Vim and Emacs, or even the more "responsible" IDE. [1] I wonder if this is because of the API features of Roslyn. I don't use C# enough to have studies the compiler, but I've heard it's an amazing piece of engineering. [0] s/emacs/vim if you like, it applies just as well.