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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

Language servers are very exciting for me. This past summer I finally installed ALE [0] and it drastically improved my experience and code quality in JS. The live in-editor linting with eslint and formatting with prettier is awesome (and these aren’t even language servers, ALE just uses them as “fixers” and “linters”). So many people denigrade these things as “crutches” for bad programming languages or underdeveloped skills, but I don’t know how you can beat getting live feedback as you type. We are mere mortals! If you don’t have something like ALE installed and you use Vim, you won’t regret the time spent getting it up and running.

[0] https://github.com/w0rp/ale

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So many people denigrade these things as “crutches” for bad programming languages or underdeveloped skills, but I don’t know how you can beat getting live feedback as you type.

As someone who turns off autocomplete and other features when forced to use an IDE, and otherwise works entirely with code in a plain text editor (sometimes Vim, sometimes Notepad --- and sometimes just good old pencil-and-paper), I can tell you that "live feedback" is a distraction. It interrupts the thinking process like a backseat driver.

I code exclusively with pen and paper. Pencils are for people that make mistakes.

In all seriousness, I think you might be smarter than me and many/most people. What languages are you referring to? The above described setup really helps me with JS. IntelliJ really helps me with Java (I spent about a year trying to write Java in Vim!).

I agree that is nice idea but sadly only the JS server improves my experience compared to the alternatives, which is more an indictment on the JS toolchain than anything else. And even then its jump to definition leaves a lot to be desired. For example Robe jumps to a method inside Rails that was defined at run-time w/o any issue. Solargraph, even with experimental features enabled doesn't. I look forward to a future where language server implementations improve.

Which JS server do you use? I tried Webstorm a while back, for example, and found it overwhelming. It tried to do a lot of things it couldn’t do well, so there were many false flags and failed refactoring, which is really frustrating if you’re coming from Java.

I wrote a javascript language server based on ESLint and Tern: https://github.com/tbodt/js-langserver

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