Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

I understand why some people use IDEs but I can't even imagine using them myself.

The first thing is that you give up control and become a prisoner to the whims of the tool developers, who think "simplicity and elegance" is a four letter word. Needless complexity and severe bloat rules the day. 90% of features you won't ever use. A build configuration and process you, and everyone else, cannot fathom. Editor defaults that seem to be carefully designed to be unlike every other editor ever written. Arbitrary constraints on pretty much everything. Platform and language specifics throughout.

I personally use Sublime Text because it's relatively simple, fast and programmable. It lets me build my process around the command line which is the only possible option for me.

I guess most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos, but I make wide use of open source on multiple platforms, which means I have to use C/C++, Objective C/C++, Rust, Java, Python, Cython and Go (I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever) and support web, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and winOS.

Even if you're not in my position, the platforms and languages you use very likely will change over time and maybe I'm old but it's nice when your development environment feels like your favorite old jeans or sneakers, not whatever the latest fashion in IDE corsets some team with apparently unlimited funding but very limited attention span has though up.

IntelliJ covers all those languages. I don't use 90% of the features but the other 10% are huge productivity increases.

I’ve found it impossible to write Objective C on a non-Xcode editor without losing my sanity; I don’t know how you do that.

> most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos

Ghetto is a very strong word. But fine.

By the way, as I see it Python and JS folks are least known to be in IDE lock-ins. In fact non Android Java also to some extent is IDE agnostic. (I assume you were trying to make the counter point here? Anyway I took that.

Having said that..

> I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever

..oh yes, could not have agreed more! :)

Anyway, the thing is - people often have to use languages like Java (Kotlin) and ObjC (Swift) for a very specific use case and that is for Android and iOS and there is no easy way to not use the IDEs. God knows every Android developer has fantasised of the day when they can use the IDE of their choice and still every tooling around the setup works flawlessly. But then that's fantasy. Yes, people do use it if they want but that needs so much work that most people won't even think of going for it (and most people are those for whom development is a skill that earns money and is not a source of passion and joy if not source of resentment).

> very likely will change over time

No you are not very old and they do change. But that change is not at all difficult to catch up to. What I am trying to say is the IDEs, which suck (a lot of them, if not all), do life make easy in many ways and for teams/group actually have use-cases where one setups (with some changes or none) works for most and that is their use case. A lot of those setups are top-down. Coming right from Apples and Googles and JetBrains.

Writing Kotlin/Java and ObjC/Swift in your favourite editor is bliss but writing it for iOS/Android is nightmare and then dealing with tooling around that if it's not THE IDE is a bigger nightmare.

I am in my late 30s and I have learned that it is no big deal. Do I hate some of it aspects of and dislike further some of them? Fuck yeah. Are those deal breakers? Naah, far from it. It's okay. It works and gets the job done.

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