Hacker News Reader

Comment by toprerules | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Using "Java-based" as a smear is pretty silly. The IntelliJ platform is an extremely solid piece of software, clunkiness and all. It does everything pretty well, with very little need for config fiddling or third-party plugins.

I won't argue with the logic, if it works, it works. But still, I tend to react negatively to "Java-based" things. I think it comes from fiddling with Xms Xmx in the past with Elasticsearch which gave me the sense that the JVM is a beast. Now you want me to use the same beast in my editor? Neovim feels a lot lighter in this regard.

First-party LSPs are great and all but some form of text editor is also at least marginally useful for writing code.

I got 'lazyvim' (a neovim distro) up and running, installed LSPs for my languages of choice (mostly java and go) and it seems like a completely broken experience to me. I don't even get any error messages telling me anything is wrong, it just doesn't work.

You may want to consider learning how to debug software before writing software.

This is the most silly comment I’ve read in a while.

If your software requires user to debug something for you then you’re the one who should consider learning how to write software before writing software.

I use new tools all the time, almost on a weekly basis. Most of those tools have bugs, software isn't perfect. Our job is to be good at finding and fixing issues in tools, and the beauty of open source is having access to fix bugs were you find them.

It's extremely odd to consume free and open source software in any capacity and just not have cultivated the understanding and desire to improve all of the things you touch. It's one of the worst trends in programming.

Imagine a world were every tool you used including your programming language cost money, and you had to spend 5000$ a month just to be a developer, and any bug you encountered could only be solved through a support ticket. That's my idea of a terrible nightmare, and why I wouldn't touch something like IDEA with a 10 foot pole.

You know, it's funny, when I was a cs student I always wondered why some of my best cs professors didn't bother using the latest and greatest tooling. As I got older I realized, my time has actual monetary value, and spending time dealing with finicky software is often not worth it. Intellij is like ~ .50c / day, and I'm way more productive with it than I am with vim (and I say this as someone who used to mostly work with straight vim in college). Maybe you don't value your time?

People in academia are notoriously disconnected from real software development, so I wouldn't use them as an example of what to do or not do.

You can be judicious with your time without avoiding any inconvenience to accomplishing a goal. Inconvenience is how you find motivation and learn new things. For 50c a day you're robbing yourself of valuable knowledge and bettering open ecosystems that are themselves fulfilling ends. If you don't put a value on learning or contributing back then I don't see why'd you'd want to be in this profession in the first place.

You may not be able to think of a worse experience, but a lot of "newer" programmers may not even know what an LSP is. While it's true that I no longer need to rely on some of the benefits of Jetbrains, when I was getting started jetbrains paving over toolchain difficulties was invaluable.

Those were both build by some of the same people and they also share some code so it's a bit of a weird comparison.

If they were both built by the same person then the answer is obvious, just use the free and open source one without built in telemetry.

FYI the same guy wrote both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com