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by jramsay
2772 days ago
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amasad, I enjoyed the perspective of your article. I agree an engineer with many years of experience is going to have different expectations to someone who is entering the profession today. I think it's similar to my perspective on the iPad – I find it interesting but limited because my experience and mental model of computing is very different to someone who is growing up with an iPad in hand. I work on the Web IDE at GitLab (among other things) which we built after we noticed that there were a few situations in our day to day work on GitLab where we didn't need a full local development environment, like updating documentation or addressing simple review comments. It doesn't replace a local IDE from me yet, but it is helpful and we hope we can make it more useful in more situations where local IDEs have shortcomings. I think the effort and maintenance of a local development environment is also a cost that is frequently overlooked – reinstalling dependencies is a headache that disappears in an automated ephemeral environment like repl.it or where we're heading at GitLab. But that seems like it's just an iteration on the status quo rather than leap frogging to a post-IDE world. I think the idea of online interactive development can go so much further. Maybe we can integrate interactive editors/terminals/previews with our planning and code review tools so that experimentation and exploration are easier and happen in line in the discussions we have planning the next feature to build. I put a few dot points down on this line of thinking last week https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/533 but I'd be interested to hear some of your more concrete ideas of what a post-IDE world might look like. |
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I think the fact that you'd have a globally accessible, pay-as-you-go, zero-setup, multiplayer programming tools is surely a different beast from the IDE. However, it does go further than this and most of the innovation to this end aren't coming from us but from our users and how they (an)use the system. I can try to predict what the post-IDE world looks like, but it's better to discover it.