Comment by Diesel555 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diesel555 | Hacker News Reader

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I keep seeing discussions on a full IDE vs an editor like VSCode. People are claiming VSCode is poor with autocompletions and other features only a full IDE can accomplish.

I use Pycharm, Webstorm, and VSCode and I don’t see the huge difference. Is it more apparent on certain languages?

They stated in their blog https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2020/09/a-picture-of-java-in...

> In the web space it is understandable to use an editor as web developers are typically working with dynamic languages, and often use other tools like browser plugins to give them what they need. But in Java, especially professional Java, you really get a lot out of a good tool that has integration with the application server and you can really use the analysis and refactoring and everything.

> VS Code is growing which is concerning, not from a competitive point of view but actually from the point of view that there is clearly a lack of understanding of what an IDE gives you

So my main question is what do full blown IDEs do that an editor like VSCode cannot?

For my job I spend a lot of time working on a python package that uses threads. I’ve found that pycharm’s debugging tools are much better than vscode’s when it comes to threads. Also, auto imports are possible while I don’t think I’m able to do that in VScode.

If someone can tell me how to set up VSCode to do this better, I would love to know. However I also need to be able to support other engineers who typically don’t work on the package but might need to drop into the code. It is much easier to tell them to download the community edition of pycharm and start working than it is to walk them through setting up another editor/ide.

I don’t particularly like pycharm, and don’t use it when I don’t have to, but in this case it’s the right tool for the job. (So far.)

What do you mean by auto imports? If you type a function, type, or other token in VS Code that is not part of the scope, but exists in the environment, it will suggest and complete an import for you. At least for Typescript.

It's not great in Python from my experience. Much worse than PyCharm, at least.

Yes it is much more apparent with typed languages (and starts to show with typed Python as well).

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