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by epicide 2383 days ago
I don't think it's necessarily (just) for a love of 80s editors. I think it's more of a litmus test that your developer experience is too tightly coupled with specific tooling.

i.e. if you can't (realistically) choose your own tools, then your experience with the ecosystem is that of your experience with the tool. No tool can be a good experience for everybody.

1 comments

Well some people would advertise UNIX as an IDE and then just try to turn into POSIX anything that they use, hardly any different.
I think you may be projecting others' arguments onto the parent.

I did not read it as "everything should support the UNIX IDE" as much as expressing a preference for it and that it's a red flag if you can't even use standard vanilla tools (e.g. grep) to do basic things in an ecosystem.

I think it's fair to say that you should be able to edit code in your editor of choice and not have a terrible time.

Which brings back to having a language designed for poor developer experience, given that tooling support cannot be part of the overall experience.

So if for language X, if I as language designer want to provide the same experience as Smalltalk, either I consider the interaction with IDE workflows, or I design command line tooling to go along the language (e.g. Go).

And the command line experience comes back again to the universe where it is more prevalent, POSIXy systems.

So I don't think I am making false assumption here, as one cannot have it both ways.