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by KronisLV 1754 days ago
I definitely agree that we're on the complete opposite ends of a wide spectrum of concerns and goals!

> So, programming without an IDE becomes untenable. I use a text editor. It feels like you're shifting language features into the IDE. What's the difference between the compiler doing it automatically vs the IDE doing it automatically?

I very much agree with this observation, but from the opposite side - for many development stacks and frameworks, working without an IDE feels like being a fish out of the water, since there are numerous plugins, snippets and integrations that provide intelligent suggestions, auto-completions and warnings about things that are legal within the language but are viewed as an anti-pattern.

I'd say that the difference between the two is pretty simple, just a matter of abstraction layers. Something along the lines of:

  - the business people have certain abstract goals, which they can hopefully synthesize into change requests
  - the developer has to implement these features, by thinking about everything from the high level design, to the actual code
  - the IDE takes some of the load off from the developer's shoulders, by letting them think about the problem and offering them suggestions, hints and assistance of other sorts to help in translating the requirements into code; of course, it's also useful in refactoring and maintenance as well, letting them navigate the codebase freely
  - the language server, linter, code analysis tools, plugins, AI autocomplete and anything else that the developer should want hopefully integrate within the IDE and allow using them seamlessly, to make the whole experience more streamlined
  - the compiler mostly exists as a tool to get to executable artifacts, while at the same time serving as the last line of defense against nonsensical code or illegal constructs
In essence, the IDE gives you choices and help, whereas the compiler works at a lower level and makes sure that any code (regardless of whether written by the developer with an IDE, one with a text editor or an AI plugin) is valid. In practice, however, the parts that the IDE handles are always more pleasant because of the plethora of ways to interact with it, whereas the output of a compiler oftentimes must be enhanced with additional functionality to make it more useful (for example, clicking on output to navigate to the offending code).

In my eyes, the interesting bits are where static code analysis tools and linters fit into all of this, because i think that those should be similarly closely integrated within the ecosystem of a language, instead of being seeked out separately, much like how RuboCop integrates with both Rails and JetBrains RubyMine. Our views may differ here once again, but i think that some sort of a convergence of tooling and its concerns is inevitable and as someone who uses many of the JetBrains tools (really pleasant commercial IDEs), i welcome it with open arms.
1 comments
hypertele-Xii 1754 days ago
Ohh, you could have dependency management built into the IDE (probably already do, I don't know). An integrated profiler could tell you how fast a function is as soon as you write it. I'm getting funny ideas.

What if the IDE worked with a distributed function database, rather than flat text files? Where you could browse (shop?) all the code written by others, by licence, performance, etc.?

Wonder if there are any programming streams/channels I could uh, spy IDE-based development from.

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