by alpinisme 6 hours ago
Sometimes I just want to open a project quickly and take a look without getting all dependencies installed and the lsp working and so on. Sometimes I want to look at another team’s project even though it’s in another language than my team works in, but I don’t want to set up that language in my environment.
This is particularly true with cpp projects, where wrestling with cmake and co just isn’t how i want to spend my time to answer a question about why something is slow or what a serialized object shape should be under various circumstances.
> Sometimes I just want to open a project quickly
Every time I've heard someone say a version of this, invariably they've spent more time doing things manually than the properly mechanised method would have achieved.
There's a seductive immediacy to certain quick & dirty manual processes that in the sum are slower if measured with a stopwatch. It could be as trivial as not having syntax highlighting means that you miss an issue because you didn't notice that something was commented out or a quoted string was quoted incorrectly.
Similarly, I've argued with many developers a few decades back that insisted that the fancy keyboard bindings of EMACS or Vim made them faster, but if raced against someone with an IDE they lost badly every time, no exceptions.
Huh? Their example could be just reading code in github or reading diffs. You shouldn’t need to pull code into a development environment just so you can GoToDefinition to understand what’s going on.
There’s all sorts of workflows where vim would mog the IDE workflow you’re really excited about, like pressing E in lazy git to make a quick tweak to a diff. Or ctrl-G in claude code.
I wouldn’t be so sure you’ve cracked the code on the best workflow that has no negative trade offs. Everyone thinks that about their workflow until they use it long enough to see where it snags.
> You shouldn’t need to
... but you do more often that the quick & dirty approach really allows.
I was just watching the Veritasium episode on the XZ tools hack, which was in part caused by poor tooling.
The attacker purposefully obfuscated his change, making a bunch of "non-changes" such as rearranging whitespace and comments to hide the fact that he didn't actually change the C code to "fix" the bug in the binary blob that contained the malware payload.
You will miss things like this without the proper tooling.
I use IDEs in a large part because they have dramatically better diff tools than CLI tools or even GitHub.
> you’ve cracked the code on the best workflow
I would argue that the ideal tooling doesn't even exist yet, which is why I don't believe that I've got the best possible setup nailed. Not yet.
My main argument is this:
Between each keypress in a "fancy text editor" of any flavour, an ordinary CPU could have processed something like 10 billion instructions. If you spend even a minute staring at the screen, you're "wasting" trillions of possible things the computer could be doing to help you.
Throw a GPU into the mix and the waste becomes absurd.
There's an awful lot the computer could be doing to help developers avoid mistakes, make their code more secure, analyse the consequences of each tiny change, etc...
It's very hard to explain without writing something the length of War & Peace, so let me leave you with a real world example of what I mean from a related field:
There's two kinds of firewall GUIs.
One kind shows you the real-time "hit rate" of each rule, showing packets and bytes matched, or whatever.
The other kind doesn't.
One kind dramatically reduces "oops" errors.
The other kind doesn't. It's the most common type however, because it's much easier to develop as a product. It's the lazy thing. It's the product broken down into independent teams doing their own thing: the "config team" doing their thing and the "metrics" team doing theirs, no overlap. It's Conway's law.
IDEs shouldn't be fancy text editors. They should be constantly analysing the code to death, with AIs, proof assistants, virtual machines, instrumentation, whatever. Bits and pieces of this exist now, scattered, incomplete, and requiring manual setup.
One day we'll have these seamlessly integrated into a cohesive whole, and you'd be nuts to use anything else.
... one day.