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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

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wokwokwok

Yes, it’s not.

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.

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It's not like commercial alternatives are automatically better though, see Visual Studio (some aspects of VStudio are still better than VSCode, but VSCode has caught up fast, and as IDE for multi-language projects it is already better - the only important feature that's still inferior in VSCode compared to VStudio is the debugger integration).

If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave Visual Studio entirely in the dust in a couple of years.

Debugger integration has always been the killer differentiator for IDEs.

I think that's a pretty bad choice of comparison. For one, they're two products under the same company. Secondly, Visual Studio is a bit of a dinosaur that suffers (and somewhat benefits) from a long history so it's easy for the VSCode team to look at that and just trim the fat and correct mistakes. They also target somewhat different domains with Visual Studio having a longer history in C++ and VSCode being more geared towards web dev (yes I know it's widely used for other languages but web is the leader and obvious target). Visual Studio is also by far not the best in its class, using IntelliJ products side by side with Visual Studio is like night and day especially when it comes to C++. A better comparison for VSCode would be something like Sublime Text since it's in the same product space of "lightweight" code editors with a focus on web.

I worked around some of the vscode folk, there are a lot of them there who do it out of love for the product and the betterment of developer tooling.

Someone should write up the story of how it started, and how it got to where it is. The backstory is fascinating.

They may be making it out of love, but they’re not the ones giving it away. The ones who are giving it away are not doing it out of love.

Out of love for long term profits maybe ;)

Vim and Emacs are free. This seems like the norm to me.

Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?

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.

> How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?

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.

Agreed. Vim was probably the most seamless of any software. If all I could see was the vim window, I wouldn't be able to say whether it was running on Linux or Mac. I don't think it gets any better than that.

> Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?

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!

Literally yesterday I set up Emacs on my new laptop, the Doom Emacs distribution. It took around 10 minutes overall.

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.

The thing to keep in mind with VS Code is that they built a new IDE on a rather humble platform, and somehow managed to leapfrog every other IDE in the market (for JS and Python anyhow) in terms of functionality while keeping performance good. It may not be a marvel of engineering, but it is a marvel for having strong product vision and top notch execution while also being well engineered.

For JS perhaps, PyCharm has a few tricks up its sleeve that I haven’t quite seen in VS Code, especially wrt debugger support.

That said, the Python IDE market has been sadly underfed for surprisingly long.

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