Hacker News Reader

Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.

View on HN

I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves.

I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I might be able to file a bug off to into the void, and restart everything, to work around it. There's not much other choice. It's just a waste of time every time it happens.

With software I control, whether or not it's a waste of time is up to me.

Yeah exactly; I think "how easy is it when everything works?" is just part of the total question of "how easy is it?" Another part is "how easy is it to figure stuff out if it doesn't work?" I think sometimes people forget to ask that second question. This applies to almost all software.

There's obviously a trade-off here, and no single right or wrong answer. Visual Studio is undoubtedly neat software with a lot of features that help people being productive; but it's indeed not as simple as the previous post made it out to be, IMHO, as it forgot about the second question.

Then again, if you're lucky nothing ever breaks and you win :-) But in my experience people usually aren't that lucky.

I too like to focus on developing my software and doing my research, and am not interested in troubleshooting toolchains, tracking down config files, or messing around with computers in any way unrelated to my work.

And that's exactly why I like dwm so much: it has zero dependencies, and no config files. It just displays the windows of the programs that I actually want to use, and gets out of my way.

You say it like it's so simple, until your OS decides to update and then the things you've been relying on are broken, yet again, or there's some new behavior that requires getting used to. I'm surprised people think the "defaults" don't get in your way because they have for me in the past which is why I looked for alternatives.

Right, until random builds start breaking in Visual Studio because some CSPROJ somewhere because visual studio is looking at the wrong DLL since there is no deterministic way to determine where VS will look for DLLs under many circumstances (maybe it’s looking at the GAC. Maybe it’s looking at the many various paths for Nuget. Maybe it’s looking at some of the default build paths) and picks up a random unpredictable version.

And since you can’t even look at the CSPROJ within VS without gymnastics debugging isn’t even easy to get started with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com