[prepend]

> Also, how are they measuring "innovation"?

This is really important. Not to diss Microsoft as they do put out innovative stuff nowadays (eg, vscode) but I want to know how they measure this as there’s a lot of trash features coming out (eg, Teams) so having more or fewer of those new things isn’t innovation.

Basically, I don’t trust Microsoft or Inc to define innovation in a way that matters to my curiosity.

[tweedledee]

I got the impression that vscode (monaco) was green lit in order to retain certain people threatening to leave. MS is having retention and talent acquisition problems. Luckily there are enough people with enough clout to do these projects. But they are definitely not normal.

[spywaregorilla]

That sounds unlikely, but if true, is... impressive? That's a non trivial product launch that has been a pretty big deal.

[tweedledee]

I think people would be surprised how much of the innovation in dev div is directly attributable to retention projects. Basically, let me do this here or I will go to Facebook and do it. I think much of the open sourcing is due to people threatening to leave if it wasn’t. They get sick of building things that get shelved.

The Steve Sinofsky era did so much damage to morale at Dev Div that they’re now going to great lengths to placate certain devs.

[yepthatsreality]

How is VS Code innovative? It’s a text editor with packaged plugins. If there was innovation then it lies in making an above board Electron app.

[prepend]

Several ways, I think.

1) As an editor it’s novel for his high performance across so many platforms.

2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.

3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.

4) Within Microsoft’s culture it turns the decades old visual studio model (good performance but locked into Windows and costly) on its head. So this is really new for Microsoft. (Even though I think it would be innovative from any company, but there aren’t any other companies I know that make money from developers so don’t actually need to charge for dev tools).

[Nicksil]

>1) As an editor it’s novel for his high performance across so many platforms.

Sublime Text is one of many cross-platform text editors with superior performance than that of VS Code.

>2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.

This existed before VS Code. Perhaps an argument can be made with respect to the UI of such a repository, but the existence of this concept has been around for a while.

>3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.

This isn't innovative. This is having a lot of money, thus resources, to have such a release cadence.

I can see the argument where VS Code is better suited for some people but innovative it is not (and that's OK).

[wayneftw]

The Language Server Protocol alone, which was invented for VS Code, was innovative enough that it's now being used by other major editors and IDEs.

Sure you might get slightly better performance with some other program but you won't get all the features or quality of VS Code with that (and for free).

[CarelessExpert]

I agree with the sibling poster, here. None of those things represent innovation. a) none are novel in the IDE space, and b) they're incremental.

If "innovation" just means "make things marginally better than before", we've got a very weak definition indeed...

[throwdecro]

That's not a bad question. I find I use it for basically all my code editing nowadays, but I don't know why. I think it's just "smooth enough" and feels consistent even as you use it for a variety of different languages. It's innovative in some subtle way.

[prepend]

I still like BBEdit on Mac and notepad++ for quick text editing, but have slowly migrated to using vscode for everything but jupyter.