If they're able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript projects, I suspect that'll be > 50% of all professional work (both FOSS and private) done on GH.
If they're able to do setup for Python, Go, Ruby, and JavaScript projects, I suspect that'll be > 50% of all professional work (both FOSS and private) done on GH.
The debugging and refactoring experiences for Go and Python in VSCode feel slow, awkward to set up and configure and just generally tacked-on.
I have gotten the PyCharm professional and GoLand licensed through my employer but I will 100% be paying for them out of my own pocket if I ever lose that.
I love it but I sometimes think of something that contains less features while is easier to develop for would be a better choice.
That said, VSCode is still very nice for front-end pretty much universally, and it's also great for things like back-end Javascript/Typescript. I think Codespaces is really going to excel when it comes to things like NodeJS -> AWS Lambda. Make code changes, run "sls test", done.
I haven't used Rider, but I'm curious how it could be easier than the Visual Studio test explorer? It seems pretty convenient, and doesn't lack any obvious features I can think of.
Some stuff it does better is things like running 64 bit and 32 bit tests at the same time, supporting both nUnit 2 & 3 without having to disable/enable the plugin. Mind you I spent some time with code in release mode trying to work why I couldn't debug a test last week.
To be fair I hate what Resharper does for Visual Studio performance and a lot of the really useful refactoring in box these days so I no longer use it.
I prefer to stick with Visual Studio but I know lots of folks who are happy with Rider. It's good for all of us when there is competition in paid for developer tools.
Weird way to put it, C# is expected to work better in VisualStudio, it's the standard/officially supported .NET IDE. For everything else I prefer VS Code personally.
I'd consider it if they come out with a cross-platform GUI toolkit for .NET Core/
While a commercial product, I've got 9 JetBrains products installed under the same toolbox subscription where it's by far the best value software suite I've ever paid for. Thanks to their Toolbox App you can update all products with a single click, just the productivity saved from not having to endure VS's multi-gigabyte updates & OS restarts pays for itself.
That said, being able to change/edit PRs in github with vscode will be awesome. Will negate the need to check out out a branch locally for a ton of cases.
Programmers create enormous value. If you can get even small single digit percentage improvements by leveraging better tooling, it pays for itself almost right away.
I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year. If I can eke out a 1% improvement in productivity that's worth $5000 a year.
I think it's a big blind spot that developers don't invest enough in.
Do you actually earn this amount per year? Or, is this just a projection of what you think the value of code you write is?
But can be his comp as well, these are not unheard[1] of numbers.
On complex codebases though I mostly need the IDE just to navigate code. Anything released in the past decade knows how to index some classes, jump around and do 'find usage'.
I agree that tooling most definitely helps, starting with your office, your chair, your hardware and your software config. You could also get 1% out of sleeping more I think.
Software tools, keyboard shortcuts, libraries, frameworks and saas software are also good targets to optimize that often don't get enough attention.
Or if you'd prefer not to personally summarize, are there any books, articles, videos, etc, you can recommend that expand on this overall life philosophy?
With the Go language server kicking off, Go development in VS Code is literally a breeze. Every single thing I'd want to do (format code, imports, run tests, run a particular test, debug a test, breakpoints, on and on) has been integrated into the VS Code plugin and it works pretty much seamlessly. I haven't used Goland since it's early release in 2016 or so, so I might be missing out on something, but it doesn't feel like it.
I've never had a good experience with PyCharm. Again might be because I've using earlier releases and things have gotten better. But I'm at a point where I'm too comfortable with VS Code and have customized it to a point where I don't think it's worth it for me to switch to another editor, especially one that is tied to a particular language.
I need to get back to it and try to fix it because I do like VSCode as a whole.
With this, I rarely have issues with VSCode picking up my environment. Hope that is of some use to you.
Strangely it works if I close the initial termnial it spawns and open a new one.
I use vscode for lightweight file editing. But for any long term project, it doesn't offer anything over Jetbrains products.
This is also why the Rust plugin only has proper debugging capabilities in CLion.
Them's fightin' words. But on a more serious note, I think 50% is a massive overestimation. We haven't seen pricing. Unless MS is willing to take a huge loss on this there's no way it will be free. We all know the resources required to run a modern web app in development mode. I can certainly see this being useful if you happen to be away from your dev machine, or if you just want to contribute to something without setting up the whole environment, but not as a full-time solution. Especially considering github is known to have outages. You'll really be SOL then.
The estimated cost for a full time developer to use the system is $23.30/month or roughly $280 a year. That's quite competitive- my "portable" workstation costs north of $2k and has a 3 year life span, so the "yearly" cost is $666. The benefits of being able to get use cheaper dev terminals in the general case could pay for itself, even before you get to the benefits of having a common environment.
Also, you can self host for free. 50% is an over estimate (I've never seen 50% of developers agree to ANYTHING), but broad adoption looks highly likely.
I think my $2k laptop uses its local storage for evaluating software, working with large data in memory, lots of other stuff.
So that’s not going away. This would be a cost on top of my hardware $666/year.
Running in a codespace, the entire codebase runs in Azure. The application performs almost as fast while debugging as it does in production deployment. It's awesome for where we've been able to convert to it.
So like I don't know your particular context but I imagine MS's moves would seem surprising for developers, say, at startups. Whereas if you work at an IT adjoint to a mechanical contractor it might make more sense. What's at stake is that MS might be ramping up to some bigger announcement, "GitHub Cloud" or so, where you pay some fee for the cloud hosting and the sales pitch is, "imagine that you can fix a bug from a bug report in a non-crappy editor like VS Code, do a quick code review and push a button which will run your tests, canary deploy, then version it and push it live -- we take care of all that infra, you just pay for the Azure hosting." If you give half of that for free to everybody, you nominally "lose" but you increase the adoption rate of a separate revenue machine, which makes up for it.
A similar strategy was used by Microsoft to make their initial profits with Windows. There it was "you don't have to worry about the hardware specs -- we have already worked all of those out and all of them work with Windows." The key point in both is to say, "what are people seeking out, at the same time as they are seeking out my product?" and then to either give people a lot of freedom or a really easy option. You would rather take one pill that is carefully engineered to have the right omega-3 balance to stave off depression AND is a good probiotic AND has all of your daily vitamins, than to have to bother with a separate fish oil pill and probiotic and multivitamin. Focusing on product "complements" is often a really good strategy.
For monorepos, it might work pretty well.
sounds exactly like what Gitpod self-hosted is for: https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-self-hosted-0.4.0/
No.
I think Gitpod Self-Hosted was successfully installed on GCP, AWS, and Azure, and we're working on documenting the process.
It also works with self-managed GitHub and GitLab installations (with Bitbucket coming soon).
This isn't always true, so it's best to look at it on a case by case basis. One wouldn't suggest that Typescript coders are a product of MS.
So far, they don't seem to be treating vscode users like the product. I think they're are building out great free tooling to entice users to use their other paid services like Azure.
This is not necessarily always the case, for example the free thing might be a loss leader, exist to boost secondary or tertiary effects or otherwise exist for non-profit motivated reasons.
We can't know whether I'm an intermediate product without knowing their goals, which they're unlikely to be transparent about. But lets suppose one of their goals is usage and market share statistics that they use as proof to convince paying customers. In that case, my usage is very much an intermediate product.
Or let's imagine that one of their goals is restored market dominance in developer tools. To that end, they would like their competitors to receive less money, leading to their collapse. If they paid somebody else to give away developer tools for that purpose, I'd obviously be the product. That they're paying for that internally obscures it, but fundamentally doesn't change the exploitative nature of the relationship.
I also really like having good developer tools. Many of them come out of community-driven open source. But some of them cost money. And for those, I very much want there to be a competitive marketplace, so there are strong incentives for all players to keep improving.
Jetbrains might not do this, but if they can make money from this, they would be just as incentivized to do this as GitHub.
I agree the lets-exploit-the-customers behavior you're talking about is currently common, but it's far from universal. And regardless, in a value-for-money relationship one has power that just isn't there when one is purely being sold.
You have the same power when not paying because there are other providers whose free services you could use instead.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, care to expand? Aren't you also the product for JetBrains, since you're one of the customers that's keeping them afloat?
When some commercial effort departs from that, it's good to be suspicious. The bills are getting paid somehow. E.g., look at network television from 1960-2000 or so. The viewers were not customers. The viewers were the product being sold to people who wanted to manipulate them. Advertisers were the customers, so the programs were generally about getting maximum influenceable wallet-connected eyeballs; quality was at best secondary.
In contrast, look at what's happened to TV since then. We're in a golden age. [1] Why? Many reasons, but a key one is that people are now paying for TV directly. To Netflix and Hulu and HBO and all the other paid streaming efforts, you're the customer, not the product being sold to somebody else. Now they have a strong incentive to make things that you don't just tolerate but love.
Microsoft in particular has a history of monopolistic behavior that has been harmful to the industry (e.g., [2], [3]). Are these developer tools awesome just because Microsoft is run by nice, generous people? I'd say instead they correctly recognize that if they want to regain some of their lost market power, they're going to have to compete with the existing tools, many of which are quite good. Why are they good? I'd say it's partly because smart people have built a strong business [4] making those tools. If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Television_(2000...
[2] https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/
[3] http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepape...
I can definitely see where you're coming from. In fact, for VS Code, I believe they collect quite a bit of metrics on your usage of the product through telemetry, so it's definitely not "free" in the sense of "nothing given" - essentially, your programming and usage habits of the program are being sent to MS every second.
Re: the case of VS Code eliminating competition and MS losing the inventive to build good stuff, I think the core editor engine being open source gives me hope that this won't happen like in the olden days of MS. But of course, still a risk.
> If Microsoft manages to eliminate the competition, they'll lose the incentive to build good stuff, just like they have in the past.
Typical strategy. You provide a good and cheap product until you reach a relative majority of a market and customer lock-in, then quietly slow down on the free improvements and start extracting money from the users.
This is an insignificant reason. People paid for cable TV and were soon shown ads. Even people who pay to see movies are shown ads before the movie and during movies via product placement. Hulu makes great shows but sells ads more highly targeted than any broadcast channels.
The biggest reason for the current golden age is that streaming services don't have to try to create the most broadly appealing content to fill the most valuable timeslots and can instead cater to each viewer's tastes directly. Breaking Bad was a great show before it got on Netflix, but it wasn't a hit until wide on-demand streaming availability helped it find its audience. Tiger King is the kind of hot garbage that would normally get an afternoon time slot on a second tier cable channel, but making it available on demand turned it into a megahit.
I agree with you that oligopolies like big movie-theater chains will try to exploit that power by doing anti-consumer things like showing ads. But that's just more proof we should be suspicious of free products that may increase oligopoly power.
It could be a strategical investment to create an ecosystem out of technology that you know the best and can influence its direction, to then sell customizations and develop services on top of it. Like MS is doing here. Or RedHat. Or Google with Kubernetes. Or Canonical with Ubuntu. And so on.
I don't think MS is very charitable company and dislike many things about them, but sometimes a deal is just mutually beneficial. Better at times than with paid products.
And if Microsoft has something terrible planned, the community would just fork the project and go in a different direction.
Moreover I want to add that people, and companies, change. Just like a nation isn't the same it was 100 years ago, Microsoft too might have toned down its malicious practises. Just as a thought to you. We don't anymore blame Germans for being Nazis either.
You blow a lot of smoke here, with "sometimes" and "might". Sure, Microsoft could have been taken over by angels straight from heaven, and is now only intent on doing charitable works until the money runs out. Many things are possible. But possible doesn't mean true. If you'd like to argue something's true, by all means do it.
I think the only substance is "the community would just fork". One, there's no particular proof that a bunch of volunteers can make something like that. Two, that's an enormous effort. Look at how much work and time it took between MS using a free IE to kill Netscape and the emergence of Firefox. And that only worked because Mozilla found a revenue model that let it afford the large number of full-time engineers needed to produce a browser.
So if you're serious about your argument, why don't you explain exactly how "the community" will afford to do that fork. And why your imagined destruction of paid developer tool vendors like JetBrains and handing MS a monopoly in the market is ok as long as you're getting something free right now.
- Developments that were in place were released.
- The subsidization model made pricing structure changes possible.
None of this has to be a big conspiracy or a big change from Microsoft's acquisition. It's possible they just have a business model that's less nefarious than you're able or willing to understand.