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Comment by dweekly | Hacker News Reader

My first startup job after college I was astonished to find that one of our most productive engineers was a deaf furry who used Windows Notepad as his dev environment. His code always compiled first time and was nearly always right. It really was something to behold.

"The way that works for you is the right way."

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Not that many years ago (maybe 2012-2014), we were taught working with R using only the base-R. Its' native script editor was a Windows Notepad or something equivalent. We used this for years.. Professors as well. For some reason we didn't know about RStudio or any other fancy IDE.

And this is why I hate reading other peoples R scripts.

15 packages loaded but only 3 used, `rm(list = ls())` at the top of every script, hard coded paths or worse using the `here` package.

I think I read somewhere that Ken Thompson still uses ed. I can't find a mention of it though

TBF using notepad + terminal is a great way to learn how a language or stack works. It's possible for pretty much everything, and once you learn how your ide (or LLM) is putting things together it makes it so much easier to fix when things go wrong

This must depend on language. I think that at least for Python, JS/TS, Go, C, Fortran there isn’t much difference in setup with notepad+terminal (or sublime+terminal for myself) relative to whatever the kids are using these days. Other than syntax highlighting and LSP, obviously, but I’m not sure those have much to do with learning how the language or stack work. Could you explain what you mean if I’m misunderstanding something?

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