Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftwareMaven | Hacker News Reader

I'm very happy that Steve is such an Emacs fan. I have little doubt that the Emacs support will be top notch when this hits the street.

View on HN

He has been an Emacs fan for a long time now. You should probably check out his "Effective Emacs" article. Lots of good advice there.

The fact that he's such a Emacs fan makes me skeptical about project Grok, to be honest. There is only so far you can take Emacs and for statically typed languages, IDE's leave Emacs in the dust.

I with he were more knowledgeable on IDE's (IDEA, Eclipse, Visual Studio, XCode) so he had a better idea of what modern developers expect from their tools.

I'm hoping Grok will succeed, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming year, it gets completely canceled.

So, as Steve mentions in his post, Grok already exists. It's designed to work with all editors, including IDEs. IDEs exhibit ... how shall I say ... interesting failure modes ... on the Google codebase. Grok will benefit users of Eclipse and IntelliJ as much as it will benefit users of Emacs and Vim.

Also worth noting: he is pretty knowledgeable about IDEs too. Why do you think he isn't?

Finally, I wouldn't count on Grok being canceled.

The whole point of Grok is that the phrase "IDEs leave Emacs in the dust" is a function of the poor design of today's tools, not anything inherent in IDEs or Emacs.

"IDE as a service" in the style of Grok (or Ensime for something currently available) puts Emacs on a level playing field with any IDE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com