A ten year old today learning programming will be locked in. As will JS yuppies and the extremely articulate product manager types.
I like it. Gives me an opportunity to become a "thought leader" by promoting the UNIX approach to enterprises in 5-10 years.
In what world is a 10-year-old locked in to the MS ecosystem any more than they were in the days of win32 and IE6? If anything, I'd look askance at Apple for Safari's hiding of `view source` by default...
Lately I know only devs that work either on macos or on Linux. I haven't seen Windows anywhere since few years (except when I do cloud gaming).
An example of a lock-in is excel back in the time when the format wasn't public. Wanna use something different? have fun manually re-entering your sheets in your new software.
How can GitHub CodeSpaces even cross your mind when thinking about lock-in? This is like saying the textbox on HN is a form of lock-in.
It wasn't public but it was reverse engineered and supported by things like OpenOffice. Anything, especially a file format, that is both proprietary and popular gets reverse engineered at some point.
- GitHub has some special things like issues and pull requests but in general you can just switch your origin URL to another Git repository that isn't GitHub and boom you are off GitHub.
- NPM you can just point your package.json at any Git repository you want, no need to use the NPM package repo.
- VSCode Online: like I said, just use a different online editor.
Not too much lock in going on here. Integrations and seamless workflow? Sure. But lock in? No I don't think so.
Not only is it easy, VS Code made it easier than ever. By creating protocols for language and debugger support, they've liberated future text editor developers from having to support every language under the sun. By adding support for the protocol, the new text editor automatically gains support for all languages.
The moat for the editor is the plugin shop. We will be able to see how committed they are to being open. At least for now, their Live Share plugin doesn't seem to be available for other editors [1]. It's nice to have easy access to debugging but how do you sell your editor if you don't have all the other productivity features?
This is literally the Embrace/Extend part of EEE
Even if they remove support for the protocols, those language and debugging servers still exist. Those servers are controlled by a wide variety of organisations, all of whom are committed to supporting the entire ecosystem of editors.
It doesn’t take much to regurgitate “EEE” on an MS article. If you can’t even imagine how the final E works in a specific case, maybe say nothing at all.
I don't personally think that Microsoft is attempting EEE here but just bringing up the point that it is, to a certain extent, made hard to fork.
- https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#pro...
I've been on the Microsoft train since I was 8. I suffered no problems picking up Rust.
> "thought leader" by promoting the UNIX approach
This is a controversial opinion around here, but the UNIX approach/philosophy isn't particularly good. It is merely beloved. The Microsoft approach isn't much better.
A thought leader would actually solve this problem instead of repeating a tired, old and failed non-solution. UNIX sucks. Windows sucks. This circular appeal to nature (UNIX is good because UNIX is good) is getting really old.
If that's what you call "locked in" things are significantly better these days than they were 20-30 years ago!
There is almost no lock in to any product in 2020....people just love the developer ecosystem that MS has built these past 5-8 years or so.