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gemini://clanmorgan.org/gemlog/2023-05-12-the-trouble-with-ides.gmi
Is Brutus stabbing you to death... oh, not that ides. These IDEs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ66wHRhe2U
Nobody building an IDE is doing so with the goal of annoying developers, at least I hope not. So why so much negativity?
Nobody building a bloat browser†is doing so with the goal of annoying humans, at least I hope not. And yet...
Eclipse, well, there's a funny story there, some intern started up Eclipse, which promptly made 50 database connections in the test environment, which killed that environment, and I got blamed for it because the DBAs on the other side of the wall thought it was 'jmates' who had caused the problem, not the intern 'jmate'. Why the heck would a unix sysadmin be running Eclipse? I get annoyed when vim has a 30 millisecond startup time. Java? A bloat browser? Fuggedaboutit!
Joel Spolsky informs us in 2001 that bloat does not exist.
Unix is my IDE. OpenBSD in particular, using a somewhat customized version of the base vi, plus various other tools that I know pretty well and can mostly debug (the man(1) crash was a beyond my skills). That's an environment. It's got problems; however, the developers accept my patches (not sure what ever happened to the strptime(3) bug I sent Apple) and make continual improvements to a complex system on a predictable cycle with little in the way of resources. How much do the Googles and Microsofts pull in for profits? Why is their code so often featured in the CVE charts?
Let's review some alternative environments.
Windows? Unusable and getting worse--rumors of ads in the start menu? Time to nuke the github account. Apple? I had to boot Mac OS X 10.11 into single user mode to cull the notification center. Xcode often beachballed itself, but BBEdit or vi ran fine. Not sure about more recent versions, the 2009 laptop only died in late 2022. Linux? I've supported it in production, and had a Linux desktop somewhere before the year 2000. Probably I could beat Alpine Linux into some sort of shape, but that would take a lot of effort for not much gain. Chrome? It had, what, nine zero-days last year? Maybe they need to lean into their IDEs more... or maybe they're going down a wrong track.
One of the dubious pleasures of living in IDE land is that something might break from one day to the next, and you’ll have to work around it until you figure out the fix or someone else does.
Windows pulled stunts like that all the time and thus earned the "fucking terrible" merit badge. Pardon my French. And so do the bloat browsers--no, really, Firefox, stop dicking around with my PDF download preference. (I don't use Firefox much these days. Chromium even less.) Apple isn't above changing your preferences behind your back. And if shit is broken in production I don't need a fisher-price environment that will randomly take 25 minutes to boot and become available. Yeah, there was a senior vice president of payments yelling at me while Windows derped its way up off disk. Good times.
In fact, as a result, you can now plug “IDE smarts” into whatever editor you like.
$ ed ~/.gitconfig
1173
/editor
editor = ed
The terms "editor" and "browser" have for some become more specific, and exclude various editors (ed, vi, etc) and browsers (lynx, w3m, etc). This is the opposite of "ASCII" which has taken on a much less specific meaning. That's a long way to say, no, LSP cannot be plugged into vi, just as JavaScript cannot be enabled in w3m. (I consider this to be a feature most excellent.) Well, maybe it could be, but that would be a linux-type situation of "a lot of work for maybe little or possibly even negative gain".
I'm using vi because the vim startup times and cursor motions were too sluggish on the 2009 macbook, and the vim folks kept adding more crap that I'd have to stop ((ZEROP productivity?) => T) and figure out how to deal with. So if vim is problematic, how well do you think some larger environment (or two) would fare?
†"bloat browser" here refers to things like Chromium, Firefox, Safari.
(I might be in a bad mood because I was fasting yesterday and there were questions about the sourdough waffles from the relatives, and this isn't Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup where you can usually go somewhere else when Mara shows up. On that note, a russet got done boiling itself.)
jdvorak said: For the non techies here, is any of this related to the security warning in the system tray that constantly tells me that Core Isolation Local Security Authority protection is off...even though everything is turned on? It's been driving us crazy for months.
Click to expand...
No. Different but known bug.
CVE-2023-29324
Maybe they've got too much bad code on their hands? Maybe they need more bad code in an IDE to help wrangle all that other bad code? I don't know, but it looks like a dumpster fire from where I am.