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by jameslk 2607 days ago
I can see more developers adopting a cloud-based IDE. There may be desktop apps, which will be Electron or PWAs (if the APIs ever evolve enough), but the environment will be fully remote. The benefit is all the set up will already be done: the IDE will provide all the same code formatting, linting, dev sandbox, environment configuration, debugging profiles. No set up of any tooling to make this work. New employees can be more productive from day one. If your environment gets fubar'd just reset it instead spending the day unbreaking your machine. The company will be able to limit bike shedding by having all the same formatting and linting rules pre-setup. Code interviews will be easier to conduct.

It's already being done to a limited degree by companies such as repl.it. Once it is customized per enterprise customer, that's when it will really take off. Microsoft seems to be in a good position to lead that.
2 comments
tempguy9999 2607 days ago
Some possible upsides certainly, but you don't see any downsides?

Lock-in leading to price hikes/interfaces changing at MS's whim/global outages of the services/loss of control over your own code/loss of network activity/being locked out for an arbitrary period because of payment errors or accidents/others.

I've had my chain yanked a few times and I don't trust any large company.

I can afford to spend a day unbreaking my machine (annoying though it is), commercially it just seems safer.

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dragonwriter 2607 days ago
> Once it is customized per enterprise customer, that's when it will really take off. Microsoft seems to be in a good position to lead that.

I think RedHat is way ahead on that front with Eclipse Che.

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aidenn0 2607 days ago
Has Eclipse gotten any better for languages not named "Java"? I tried it for a while for C development (maybe 8 years ago?) and it was terrible. As in "I don't even know where to start fixing this" terrible.
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dragonwriter 2607 days ago
> Has Eclipse gotten any better for languages not named "Java"?

I don't know, but Eclipse Che isn't Eclipse in the same way VS Code/Online isn't Visual Studio.

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