> VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time.
That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.
That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.
It’s just free.
What people mean when they say “I can’t believe how good this is” is:
“I can’t believe how good this is for something I got for free”
That’s not engineering excellence. It’s just engineering; being given away as a loss leader.
Vscode is good and well maintained, but that’s because a lot of money is being spent making it so.
Enjoy it; there’s no harm in taking money people are giving away. …just don’t presume they’re either a) doing it for love, or b) going to keep doing it indefinitely.
Someone should write up the story of how it started, and how it got to where it is. The backstory is fascinating.
If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave Visual Studio entirely in the dust in a couple of years.
Literally never would be my answer.
People like vscode because of the time and effort that has been spent making it friendly and approachable, yet still powerful.
Those are not just things that magically happen.
They didn’t happen because it’s free.
Those are things you get from a paid product team that prioritises issues, ux, etc. and a company that pays to implement them.
It's pretty damn seamless with Vim. I code on a Mac these days, but was using Windows (w/ WSL) and Ubuntu about 50/50 before that. The same Vim (neovim) config script followed me everywhere.
This seems like a reflection of your environment. This has happened to me more than once with both Vim and Emacs (and not just at a Vim conference:-D). The environment at the time one was a C++ shop, another was a Ruby conference. For example people were amazed when they heard about how you can call vim APIs with Ruby!
The thing that surprises me most is the fact that people don’t want to learn the tools. I get the point that Emacs/Vim ecosystem is difficult to get used to because of well, multiple reasons. But it worths the time because these tools are amazing. You need to invest a couple of hours in Vim, probably some more in Emacs, but it’s just one time investment and then you have an instrument (or two) to rely on.
That said, the Python IDE market has been sadly underfed for surprisingly long.
> Maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself.
No criticism meant of either VSCode or Hillary Clinton, but sometimes fans take things a bit too far.
Of course, this is an earlier generation. But if the commenter is correct that VS Code is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time, then what the heck are we doing. And if the commenter is incorrect, then what the heck are we doing as a community in our duty to educate to the extent that the commenter doesn't realize that massive projects like this have been implemented, and continue to be implemented.
We have rockets that land by themselves, trucks making cross-country autonomous trips without intervention, multiple systems that can securely run arbitrary sandboxed code from anywhere in the world by simply typing a URL. I'd want someone to be excited not by an IDE for an IDE's sake, but what they can build with their IDE.
On the other hand, an equally valid measure of impact is utility * number of people. While things like self-driving trucks are extremely cool, as of today their overall impact is quite small. VSCode impacts an enormous amount of people every single day and saves them a ton of time.
So while VSCode is nice, it's not even the most impressive piece of software bearing the Visual Studio branding.