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I was going to say "why on earth are you making them use a line editor there is probably a vscode plugin for the assembler with syntax highlighting" then I got to your point about it being in their head instead. This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why.

As a sort of an adjacent point, I worked through a book that is used on a course often called "from nand to Tetris". It is probably the best thing I've done, in terms of understanding how computers, assemblers and compilers work

https://amzn.eu/d/07pszOEy

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> This reminds me of what zed Shaw said, for some reason code written without an ide is better and he's not sure why.

I am not sure whether the statement is correct; I am not sure whether the statement is incorrect either. But I tested many editors and IDEs over the years.

IDEs can be useful, but they also hide abstractions. I noticed this with IntelliJ IDEA in particular; before I used it I was using my old, simple editor, and ruby as the glue for numerous actions. So when I want to compile something, I just do, say:

    run FooBar.java

And this can do many things for me, including generating a binary via GraalVM and taking care of options. "run" is an alias or name to run.rb, which in turn handles running anything on my computer. In the IDE, I would have to add some config options and finding them is annoying; and often I can't do things I do via the commandline. So when I went to use the IDE, I felt limited and crippled in what I could do. My whole computer is actually an IDE already - not as convenient as a good GUI, of course, but I have all the options I want or need, and I can change and improve on each of them. Ruby acts as generic glue towards everything else on Linux here. It's perhaps not as sophisticated as a good IDE, but I can think in terms of what I want to do, without having to adjust to an IDE. This was also one reason I abandoned vim - I no longer wanted to have my brain adjust to vim. I am too used to adjust the language to how I think; in ruby this is easily possible. (In Java not so much, but one kind of has to combine ruby with a faster language too, be it C, C++, Go, Rust ... or Java. Ruby could also be replaced, e. g. with Python, so I feel that discussion is very similar; they are in a similar niche of usage too.)

I really like this approach. A good reminder that Ruby started out as a shell scripting language, as evidenced by many of the built in primitives useful for shell programming.

Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching. If you don't have auto-refactoring utils, you'll have to be stricter about information-hiding. And if you don't have AI, you might hesitate to commit to the first thing you think of. You might go back to the drawing board in search of a deeper, simpler abstraction and end up reducing the size of your codebase instead of increasing it.

Conveniences sometimes make things more complicated in the long run, and I worry that code agents (the ultimate convenience) will lead to a sort of ultimate carelessness that makes our jobs harder.

> Simpler tools are a forcing function for simplicity. If you don't have code search, you'll need to write code that is legible without searching.

i was working in a place that had a real tech debt laden system. it was an absolute horror show. an offshore dev, the “manager” guy and i were sitting in a zoom call and i was ranting about how over complicated and horrific the codebase was, using one component as a specific example.

the offshore dev proceeded to use the JetBrains Ctrl + B keybind (jump to usages/definitions) to try and walk through how it all worked — “it’s really simple!” he said.

after a while i got frustrated, and interrupted him to point out that he’d had to navigate across something like 4 different files, multiple different levels of class inheritance and i don’t know how many different methods on those classes just to explain one component of a system used by maybe 5 people.

i used nano for a lot of that job. it forced me to be smarter by doing things simpler.

When .NET first came out I started learning it by writing C# code in Notepad and using csc.exe to compile it. I've never really used Visual Studio because it always made me feel that I didn't understand what was happening (that said, I changed jobs and never did any really big .NET project work).

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