Comment by euos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euos | Hacker News Reader

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What is an IDE? As someone who worked on IDEs approx between 2003 and 2014 (I did not like the market afterwards, commercial IDEs I basically impossible now unless you are legacy, like JetBrains).

What is an IDE? Personally, I consider IDE an integrated suite of source editor, visual debugger, build system. E.g. I put a breakpoint, push a button, it builds, runs and hits a breakpoint. Other tools (SCM integration, profiler integration, design tools) are an add-on.

So, is Bash an IDE? I think pretty much every modern editor allows setting up macros so it is possible to trigger build/run GDB from within the editor. Does author have an issue with Vim, Emacs and Sublime? What is the difference between Sublime and VSCode?

I started working after the collapse of RAD (rapid application development, think Delphi/VB) and model-driven tools (where you do UML and generate code from model). I am very strongly against those tools, don't think they can be done well. But those are category separate from IDE :) E.g. Rational Rose - could generate code from UML and parse the code to UML, but no code writing inside.

Another thing I take huge offence is people dumping on Eclipse. It was a revolutionary product that disrupted the space. It was blazingly fast compared to Java IDEs of the time (JBuilder, Visual Cafe and such) and had refactoring support comparable to IntelliJ (that was a paid product). It got destuffed at a critical junction (complete rearchitecture from Eclipse3 to E4) and saw crappy plugins (and Java really lost popularity since). But it was an amazing product 24 years ago.

I think this is an important distinction. I've seen many coworkers who laugh at my JetBrains IDE while claiming that their 'text editor' is better as they load it up full of plugins thus turning it into an IDE.

My general takeaway about the dev community is this- stop giving a crap about what other people are doing. If you find a tool that fits your needs and that you like then I'm delighted for you. Ask others if you want to learn but stop telling others they're wrong for having their own preferences.

>stop giving a crap about what other people are doing.

This is only acceptable for things that don't have a network effect. If svn is the universal standard, then that forces me to use svn.

I love this comment and love to see IDE features returning to editors via language servers and better build tools.

Eclipse RCP was a pretty cool toolkit for building enterprise desktop apps that could be deployed to both Windows and Linux desktops. You could build complex stuff without much effort. And by 2000s standards it looked pretty slick and sophisticated.

An IDE is integrated: it comes with the tools (debugger, build system, language support, etc) built in. If they're not integrated, it's not an Integrated Development Environment. I'd say things like VS Code, Sublime Text, Vim, and other plugin-based editors are "Plugin-based development environments", or PDEs (my term). Most IDEs these days are hybrids; they come with an integrated environment and support plugins as well.

Things like Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ and such are packages and not the products. Think distinction between Linux distro and Linux kernel.

E.g. my former team used to ship "IDE" - that is, use new project wizard to setup your folder, use editor to write the code, press a button to build, debug and profile. We also shipped standalone "visual profiler" - that had custom configuration for window layout/toolbars and stripped down list of included plugins. You open an executable, profile it, see per-line metrics in the read-only editor (that was a complete editor from the IDE, just in read-only mode).

So, does dropping a bunch of plugins (that noremally should not activate unless used) suddenly convert sluggish IDE into fast editor.

I feel like the negative perception of IDEs usually comes from busy UI. Devteam needs to balance discoverability (e.g. adding UI for configuring build and debug) and perceptions of the lightweightness.

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