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Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

While VS Code is definitely good in general, and first choice for languages like JavaScript, I find it really hard to compare it to JetBrains PyCharm and GoLand (understanding GoLand has no free version).

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.

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Yup, VSCode isn't comparable to IntelliJ or the rest at all for anything other than Typescript. IntelliJ offers a bunch of life saving refactorings. Want to extract a new method? Ctrl+Alt+M. The exact same shortcut works in every language, with almost the same semantics as much as possible. Intellij can do context aware autocompletion (Ctrl+Shift+Space).

I use vscode for lightweight file editing. But for any long term project, it doesn't offer anything over Jetbrains products.

I pay for the full JetBrains subscription. While I still use vscode for typescript and rust, I use JetBrains for anything else. It's one of those no brainer purchases that pays for itself within a month.

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.

> I estimate conservatively I produce $500,000 in value a year

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?

I think he was talking about the value he generates, so possibly something like revenue/profit per employee kind of thing. For example, FB and Google make more than $1M revenue per employee. You can go more granular and look at the impact of your team or yourself as well.

But can be his comp as well, these are not unheard[1] of numbers.

[1] https://levels.fyi

Yes, I'm talking about value. My comp is less than that figure. There are some developers with total comp like that though.

You can never earn the amount of value you produce. Your employer can't survive if they hire you for that amount.

Not sustainably, but they could if they underpay others. Or run a deficit.

Many vendors do think like this when they start their offer with 'how much is your time worth'? Indeed, your tool might save me 1 hour but it's not necessarily worth the price.

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.

Chair, desk, distraction free environment, fast computer, fast internet, multiple screens, consistently good sleep, diet, and exercise. Stable emotional environment (relationships). You could easily get better than 1% from each of those. I'm ruthless about optimizing these.

Software tools, keyboard shortcuts, libraries, frameworks and saas software are also good targets to optimize that often don't get enough attention.

(Serious question) I'm curious to hear more about "ruthlessly optimizing" your emotional environment and relationships. That is not something heard everyday...

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?

It's not the right word for that, but in general just be extremely picky about serious qualities in your partner. Ditch bad relationships and maybes quickly, because there is a high opportunity cost. Value peace in a relationship, and stay away from people who like to fight.

I've found I love JetBrains IDEs when I'm operating as a one-language power-user. But the last few years I find myself needing to use 2-3 languages in the same day (several more if you include markup "languages"). VSCode has become my editor of choice for local dev and vim for remote dev/debug.

I use IntelliJ with the various language plugins for this reason. It allows me to use the same setup for all my languages. Granted, I do get the full license through my employer, but I think it's worth it even if my company didn't pay for it.

This is exactly my current situation. In one day I can end up writing in up to 4 languages (Go, Python, C, C++) and having one editor, with one set of settings for editing, and all the customization available in a single settings.json file, is just too good to give up for language-specific IDE's, especially ones that require yearly subscriptions.

I just use intellij for the same purpose. Today alone, I made changes in Kotlin, Typescript, Java, JS, Groovy, and Python. All in a single project, in Intellij. I do use and appreciate vscode, sometimes, but the experience is nowhere near as good as Intellij for me.

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.

Have you tried the Remote Development VS Code extensions from Microsoft? I find them quite neat.

Even for C# VSCode is way less useful than VisualStudio, which also has a free version (though doesn't run on Linux)

Honestly, unless I'm working on a Windows machine, I find JetBrains Rider to be the best option for C# specifically. This is especially true if you like having your tests easily accessible from your IDE.

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.

> This is especially true if you like having your tests easily accessible from your IDE.

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.

Minor point: the Rider test explorer tells you why your tests aren't appearing. Visual Studio's test explorer will just say "You have no tests, try rebuilding your solution" even if you already rebuilt it.

I assume in part this is because the Rider test explorer is based on the one in Resharper.

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.

While Visual Studio is powerful, I have ran into wierd behaviors within the IDE that just make it a chore to use. Personally, I've preferred C# on VSCode over Visual Studio so far.

> Even for C#

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.

JetBrains has Rider on Linux for C# and while not free, if you're already paying for other JetBrains IDE's, as many devs do, it's included. I just think there's still not much reason to do C# on Linux over say Kotlin if you want a huge ecosystem.

I'd consider it if they come out with a cross-platform GUI toolkit for .NET Core/

I feel with .NET Core migrations the wind is shifting, at least for web development where VSCode is starting to be preferable to Visual Studio. VSCode isn't likely to get the WinForms or XAML visual designers any time soon, so Desktop apps will likely stay a Visual Studio niche, but even then I've found myself increasingly working in VSCode up until the point I need to do a UI tweak even with Desktop apps.

It's no contest, JetBrains Rider provides the best C# development experience on any platform, with smarts well beyond what VS is capable of.

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.

I've been using VS Code's Go and Python plugins for development for the last 2 years and I've never had any major issues. In fact, my experience continues to get better after every release.

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 made the transition from PyCharm to VSCode a couple of days ago and... it's not been smooth. Virtualenv doesn't automatically activate when I first open the workspace, pylint doesn't work yet VSCode thinks it's working and debugging just doesn't seem to work full stop.

I need to get back to it and try to fix it because I do like VSCode as a whole.

One thing that helps me managing Python environments in VS Code: I start VSCode from the command line with my virtual environment activated ("code -n .").

With this, I rarely have issues with VSCode picking up my environment. Hope that is of some use to you.

I will try it, thanks.

Pro-tip for VSCode: if you have a .venv directory in the root of your project, VSCode will try to activate it when you open the project. A few other tools have adopted that convention, too, and now at my job so have we. Rather than sticking virtualenvs in some odd location, the venv for ~/projects/mystuff is ~/projects/mystuff/.venv, and now it almost always Just Works.

Mine is in the root directory but it's called venv, without the preceeding dot. I'll dig around the settings to see if I can change what it looks for.

Strangely it works if I close the initial termnial it spawns and open a new one.

The issue with PyCharm is that it’s actually quite hard to extend due to lack of proper documentation for their plugins.

I love it but I sometimes think of something that contains less features while is easier to develop for would be a better choice.

I think VSCode sets a really good level across all languages (even more esoteric ones like Idris) however it can't compete with IDEs essentially dedicated to a tech stack like PyCharm or Visual Studio.

Just an anecdote from a sample size of one - I had a recent situation where I had to nagivate and edit a code base that was a mix of Go, C++, and JS. And I had a paid IntelliJ Ultimate license. Long story short, VSCode did the best/fastest go-to-defintion like navigation given the constraints. IntelliJ separating Clion to a separate install is rather unfortunate. I can edit Java and Go together, but not C++

I think it's because CLion is a bit of a separate codebase, integrating with GDB and all that, rather than just a language plugin that's also sold as a separate IDE as is the case for other languages.

This is also why the Rust plugin only has proper debugging capabilities in CLion.

I used to use rubymine a few years ago and maybe I just wasn't using it right but I can do all the stuff in rubymine in vs code. The only thing I'm missing is being able to look through the code for gems.

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