Ask HN: The best development environment you've ever used | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The best development environment you've ever used

8 pointsekiru19 comments

I'm not necessarily asking what development environment you use currently, but the best you've ever used.

What makes it so great?

If I could combine the simplicity of Visual Studio, the flexibility and power of emacs, and the refactoring support of Eclipse, that would be the best development environment ever.

As it stands, I would probably put Visual Studio in the lead.

I have a major beef with Eclipse for how projects are structured. The whole workspace thing drives me crazy and makes branching and pushing and pulling from remote servers a real pain in version control.

Emacs is simply getting old. It's amazing. It's seriously one of the best programs ever written, but it would nice to have some more IDEish stuff around. I know I could do a lot more customization to my emacs, but I just haven't had the time.

If I could find a good editor which embeds or emulates emacs well, that might be the solution.

I used VS+VIemu at my last job (.net shop), and it started to feel kinda homey after a while.

Borland Turbo C++ version 4.5. I used it without prejudice; I was too inexperienced as a programmer to form opinions about programming tools, so I used all I had with great pleasure and made things.

It was good to be able to just start impossible to code projects without realizing their difficulty. Then, I felt like I could implement an OS "if only I finished this chapter"; I wanted to write my own everything. I read other people's code and copied it. I used to send thank you letters to people who published their code. I used to be a human being.

I used to look for problems to solve, now I find problems that stand between me and a solution and I look for the quickest shortcut; download it, hire someone, postpone it, you don't need it, etc.

Visual Studio.

It auto-indents your code making it readable. Excellent Intellisense. Find/Replace within project and solution. Integrated debugger is full-featured.

emacs

Because you can easily flex and modify any aspect of it, for any need you might have.

Slickedit by far, if you dabble in more than one language. I don't use it currently because of its expensive license ~300$, but it wins in sheer power and features as a beefed up text editor.

Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1984.

It used WordStar (which was the defacto standard WP in its day) keybindings and you were able to edit, compile run in less time than any of today's IDEs - all on a 4.77MHz 8088 CPU with 64k RAM !!!

yyp

What makes it so great is that it lets you focus on code instead of using the program.

VS Studio, eclipse etc.. feels like I am using an application as much if not more than I am coding.

Yeah I recently dumped my .net job and ran for the hills. Now I've got my slices /etc/host'd, and I can just sshfs in and gvim around to my hearts delight.

(I actually got reprimanded for using gvim at the last job, luckily we struck a compromise with vs+viemu.)

Why would anyone at your job care about the editor you're using? Sounds like unnecessary micromanagement to me. Why I can't understand why would you ever pick vi over VS, but if they had a problem with your choice of IDE then you were right to leave, sounds like an awful place to work at.

It shouldn't matter up until the point where the results of your customized development environment cannot be (readily) replicated. Part of the reason for standardization is to help avoid "it works for me"-type issues.

This isn't an issue for independent development efforts but it is critical in team and enterprise settings.

I was learning C# (had just come from Java/Eclipse land), and I was using the command-line compiler just to get comfortable and learn some in's and out's.

I was the first CS programmer they hired (I was still in school), they were crewed up with a lot of nice guy MIS's... it was funny when they hired another CS guy and he started doing the same things I did when I started, and getting in minor trouble with management.

They also wouldn't let us use ANY scripting languages for anything... everything should be compiled code based on "Principal", it runs faster and is "strongly typed" which is philosophically "better" I was told without a reason. Never mind that most of the other coders still used strings for everything (especially numbers), and 50%+ of the code base was XML serializers/deserializers. (Also the web apps were hideous,... WebForms what a shitty set of web-dev metaphors.)

I also got in trouble for wasting my time writing unit tests, we were an "agile" company with no time for tests.

Yeah, once I had a plan and some cash, I got the fuck out of dodge.

(ultimately, while still there, I ended up in vs+viemu, which I found fairly productive, and would highly recommend it to any VS code slingers)

Environment? Xcode. Editor? Vim.

Unix/Linux.

Vi on Unix and Visual Studio on Windows (with Vim bindings). Vi and Visual Studio have one thing in common that makes them great, the customization. Developers are very picky when it comes to the tools they want to use. We like it to work in a certain way. Every good developer I know has his own customizations that pretty much is unique to him or her.

I guess it's Factor UI.

It's nicely integrated (the words you've just added show up in help) and it does really suggest interactive development (for example, by auto-importing vocabularies for you).

I miss the built-in editor, tho...

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