The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

https://triplebyte.com/blog/editor-report-the-rise-of-visual-studio-code

by Harj • 8 years ago

479 312 8 years ago

ammon2• 8 years ago

Another interesting angle on this is that VS Code is free (and open source), while Sublime is proprietary and (nominally) costs $80. I wonder how many people don't use Sublime because of the price? Atom is free too and never surpassed Sublime.

no_wizard2• 8 years ago

Expressedly, this is my opinion solely, with that said:

I stopped using Sublime and stopped recommending it not because of price (I actually prefer to pay for things when I can) but because the community plugins for my development workflow (PHP + Frontend) is...not great. I also found the distinct lack of API documentation to be frustrating (I'm not above making my own extensions and I very much like Python)

Visual Studio code at least has good front end tooling (The PHP extensions can't handle my large PHP projects, though I am tempted to try the a paid extension on this that I heard works well in Visual Studio proper, also, Twig support plain sucks. I'm not 100% certain if this is a limitation of VS Code or the Extension but it can't find my variables from the PHP files)

I've since moved to a combo of PHPStorm (my daily driver) and Visual Studio Code for Git Merges (I prefer the way you can handle it in VS Code) and doing other misc tasks that I don't want to fire up a PHPStorm instance for.

Same reason I never liked Atom. Tooling always seemed off somehow.

Side note? If you are going to pay for an editor, I recommend any JetBrains product offering.

wolco• 8 years ago

PhpStorm is by far the best editor. The slowness is a huge issue.

For frontend sublime offers a nicer experience. VCode feels slightly off but I do want to move over because it's free.

For quick development vim is perfect. If you need to make single page changes on multiple remote sites nothing is faster than dreamweaver 8. The designer/code split was always great no editor ever implemented anything to match.

asituop2• 8 years ago

Be careful that's it's only open-source if you build it yourself or if you use VS-Codium (https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium).

The VS-Code that everyone uses is under a Microsoft License and includes close source Microsoft telemetry (spyware?) and user data collection :

https://code.visualstudio.com/License/

pavanagrawal123• 8 years ago

I recently contributed VSCodium windows support, and IMO it's not too big of a different from the binaries that MS provides. The only few differences are the telemetry endpoints that are in the normal binary, that can be disabled through the setting, and some other MS specific branding

BeetleB4• 8 years ago

Not sure why you're downvoted. This is a concern. In my company, I downloaded VS Code to use it with F# for a toy project. But when I saw you cannot disable all data collection, I pretty much uninstalled it.

Most likely there is no IP risk, but I did not want to go through the trouble of finding out precisely what data is collected, and/or cross check with our legal department.

Plenty of people at the company do use VSCode, so I'm sure eventually IT will simply provide it to us through their own software repository (as they do for Visual Studio).

scrollaway2• 8 years ago

Edit: Disregard, I don't know wtf I'm talking about.

neurobashing• 8 years ago

It's right there on the home page:

"Sublime Text is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses.

Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform."

Are we talking about some other sublime?

ianamartin• 8 years ago

Wat?

wasted_intel• 8 years ago

No, it isn't. From the website:

  Sublime Text is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses.

ginko• 8 years ago

What's the point investing time in learning a proprietary tool when the developers could take it away from you at any moment?

GuB-42• 8 years ago

A lot of people I know who use Sublime never paid. In fact, I don't know anyone who paid for it IRL except myself.

If you don't pay, you only get a nag screen from time to time as you save. And cracks most likely exist if you want to get rid of it without paying.

BTW, I still use Sublime Text. I gave a try to VS Code and it is really great. It has most of the things that made me switch to Sublime (from Emacs), plus some more. The issue I had was performance. Sublime is generally more responsive for me, with less subsecond but still noticeable pauses.

imcotton• 8 years ago

Funny tho, that purchasing prompt is the only "feature" I'd missed from Sublime after switching to VS Code.

So I made one for it [1].

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=cottonh....

kstrauser2• 8 years ago

I've paid for Sublime, but I abandoned it for VS Code. For instance, the default Python setup - in particular its handling of virtualenvs, linters, and formatters - works pretty much out of the box. I was constantly fighting against the Sublime plugins to make them work halfway reasonably. Sublime is faster, but the lower mental overheard required to make VS Code work properly makes a much bigger difference to me than the price does.

indemnity• 8 years ago

I'm not Microsoft's biggest fan (I switched away from .NET and their platforms a few years ago, switched to Mac, etc).

But I use VS Code, it really is a great little editor with a good ecosystem.

The JavaScript support pulled me in, but it's a pretty decent Rust environment now as well!

brokenwren• 8 years ago

VS Code solves different problems then IntelliJ, PyCharm and Atom. I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. For example, I wouldn't ever code a full Java stack in VS Code. I'd go straight to IntelliJ.

jtms• 8 years ago

There’s a jetbrains (IntelliJ) flavored ide for basically everything - even c#! I prefer Rider for doing c# in Unity3D over VS or VSCode because it seems muc more performant and the vim plug-in is way better

macjohnmcc• 8 years ago

I actually enjoy using Rider on macOS over using Visual Studio for Mac with C#.

unsignedint• 8 years ago

I find Rider only way I can get performance and features of Resharper in a sane way. Visual Studio + Resharper feels very sluggish, while Rider doesn't have so much of problem with that. Also more convenient when opening more than one solutions simultaneously. (Which I do all the time!)

xtracto2• 8 years ago

VS Code has something that JetBrains IDEs cannot match: Price.

For startups in developing countries $200 per seat is a lot of money... VS Code or Atom look amazing in comparison for $0

tossaccount123• 8 years ago

VS code is a jack of all trades editor, obviously it's not going to be able to match more specialized editors

munchbunny5• 8 years ago

Separately from being my JS IDE of choice, VS Code has for the most part replaced Notepad++. It's quite good at being a general purpose "heavyweight" text editor.

ourmandave• 8 years ago

Has anybody written a Notepad++ to VS Code command translation guide?

I use Notepad++ for all sorts of text related things (cutting, sorting, making 100s of julennne phrases) but not as an editor.

If there was a cheat sheet of VS shortcuts I could ditch Notepad++ completely.

zeppelin101• 8 years ago

I don't see the point of ditching Notepad++. It's still an excellent text editor and it's more lightweight than VSCode. I use both and I'm very happy with it.

hahamrfunnyguy• 8 years ago

That's exactly what it's intended for, in my view. I still use Notepad++ for quick edits though, mostly because I am so used to it.

nickbarnwell2• 8 years ago

I use emacs for Java and Scala development with LSP quite successfully, and VS Code's support for language servers is as good as they come. Is it primarily debugging that's the impediment to switching for you?

nickysielicki2• 8 years ago

I have some time off soon and there's a project I have planned that will use Scala. What LSP server do you recommend, and are you using it with lsp-mode or with eglot?

globuous• 8 years ago

Me too, the Spacemacs layers are really nice actually. Java and Scala ain't gonna keep me away from dired, macros, magit, org, nor my favorite shortcuts :D

Speaking of, I had a Spark lab for school and it was too powerful for my machine, so I ssh'ed into the school's computer and ran a spark-shell from there, in an emacs split. Then with a macro, it was easy to "send region" or "send buffer" to the ssh'ed spark-shell. I made a quick script for that actually, it was so convenient: https://github.com/tbinetruy/config/blob/master/spacemacs/sp...

And that's why I love my emacs, I can just do stuff like that so easily :D

int_19h• 8 years ago

While we're on the subject - not that many people are aware of it yet, but VS Code has a debugger protocol similar to LSP for pluggable IDE-agnostic debuggers.

https://microsoft.github.io/debug-adapter-protocol/

https://github.com/Microsoft/debug-adapter-protocol/blob/gh-...

I hope this takes off. Between it and LSP, pretty much any text editor can be an IDE with little effort.

BrandonRisell• 8 years ago

I switched from IntelliJ IDEA to VSCode for a massive legacy Java/Wildfly project. It started as an experiment, I figured I'd be back to IntelliJ within a week. I'm still using VSCode after a couple months now and I don't see a reason to go back to IntelliJ.

It starts and runs well, and has plugins for anything I might need. The day I run into something there isn't a plugin for, it's awesome to know that I could just make one to suit my need.

As far as negatives, VSCode has times where it gets hung up and intellisense is borked for a couple minutes, but I can usually just ignore the red squigglies until it catches up. I also don't yet feel as fast as I did in IntelliJ, IntelliJ has some really great keyboard shortcuts and I could jump around and work very quickly because of it. I'm hopeful this gap will close as I continue to learn and remember keyboard shortcuts in VSCode.

33degrees3• 8 years ago

I agree with the first two, but does VS Code really solve different problems than Atom?

sonnyblarney• 8 years ago

Java on VS code is still kind of pain, which is too bad.

To me, VS Code and Typescript were made for each other.

Python is just a free bonus.

woolvalley• 8 years ago

IntelliJ has a huge head start in targeting Java. Right now it's my python & golang editor of choice.

sbilstein2• 8 years ago

VSCode is fast, stable, and the plugin ecosystem really beats Sublime Text at this point. I was skeptical because Microsoft but it is hands down my favorite editor.

nystorm• 8 years ago

I'm also skeptical of microsoft products, but they have come a long way since getting their new CEO. I've gained a lot of respect from them for better integration with non-windows platforms.

tomnipotent• 8 years ago

MS developer tools have always been great, independently of whatever mess Windows gets itself into.

belltaco• 8 years ago

Someone said big companies are like aircraft carriers, they take a long time to change course and travel to the right destination, but if they do, once they are there they bring massive impact compared to more nimble and smaller sea vehicles.

protomyth• 8 years ago

expect for a feature that keeps a lot of people on other editors (recordable macros) https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/4490

billforsternz• 8 years ago

Agreed, it's bizarre that this feature is missing and apparently impossible to implement as an extension. It's been a fundamental feature of every serious programmers' editor for over 30 years!

sbilstein2• 8 years ago

I don’t use macros but it looks like I should tbh

ksec• 8 years ago

How can anyone say VSCode is fast, and then compare it to Sublime Text ? They are not even in the same order of magnitude.

VSCode is definitely fast enough for most uses cases, but I still wish it was as fast as Sublime Text, from Scrolling Frame-rate to response time.

audiolion2• 8 years ago

Agreed. I use VS Code now because I needed syntax support for new es7+ and graphql.

But I miss sublimes speed it was unmatched, and the jump to symbol using @ or # in a file is worthless in vs code because it waits to calculate until you use it.

lowercased3• 8 years ago

However, it seems that the average C# or Java engineer who goes through our process does less well than the average Ruby or Go engineer. I have no idea why.

Given that they have the test info... and they're the ones deciding pass/fail... it's a bit strange they "have no idea why". Well, perhaps just this person doesn't?

Are people not finishing the projects? Do the projects have syntax errors in them? Or logical bugs? What metrics do they use for "pass/fail"?

nepeckman• 8 years ago

I think the author is saying they have no idea why C# and Java devs are worse on average than Ruby and Go devs. I'm sure they know the specific reason those devs fail, but are trying to understand the more general trends that lead to higher rates of failure. I would guess that this is another instance of the python paradox (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html).

eksemplar2• 8 years ago

We’ve been a C# house since .net 2.0 and having recently moved a lot of our things to first JS and then python I think it’s the tooling.

Visual studio does a lot of things for you without a CLI. Want to deploy? Right click on your project and do the UI wizard for it. I mean, even nuget has a gui.

On top of that C# comes with a ton of easy to use features from its library. Like AD integration is just a library that gives you everything you need, at least until it doesn’t and you have to write your own bits and things get hard, but until then everything is easy and it’s much easier than using an open source library for it. I think any C# programmer could use its basic functionality from VS without ever looking at its documentation, and while Django and flask integrates with AD as well, you can’t really say the same thing about them.

You don’t get that with most tools. Ironically I think the fact that .net core has moved to a more CLI sort of environment has made visual studio a worse option for it than visual studio code, but we aren’t really going down that road, so what do I care.

I do care about python support for visual studio code, and it’s damned awesome.

avip• 8 years ago

If I recall correctly the test is 100% automated. Write code, run tests. Answer multiple choice. Humans and their bias need not apply.

PurpleRamen2• 8 years ago

There is always bias in something manmade. The tests might be slightly unfavorable for certain kind of developers.

In some comment here it was mentioned that the C#-tests are not good enough and some others mentioned that this company seem to favor dynamic languages. Maybe there is some truth to that.

halfnhalf• 8 years ago

I think he means he has no idea why candidates of those languages are less likely to meet his pass criteria

chadash• 8 years ago

I have a theory on this. For most interview style coding problems (which tend to be algorithmic in nature), scripting languages such as python or ruby:

1) are less verbose

2) don't require worrying about typing

3) have really easy ways to manipulate strings, iterate, etc., which are often found in interview style problems

Java and C# have many advantages over python and ruby, but I think that they put you at an inherent disadvantage for many interview style questions which often require you to solve an algorithmic or data structure type problem in a limited amount of time [1].

[1] This doesn't explain why people using Go would tend to pass at higher rates, but since the Go community is comparatively much smaller, there could be other factors at play there.

purple_ducks• 8 years ago

Maybe because with Go, there's less ways to skin a cat compared to each of the other languages? Less expressive language - just hammer out code worry free about being judged on method or code style?

bargl• 8 years ago

I am a C# dev who plays with python in my spare time.

In coding interviews, some interviewers want compiler approved code. That's a lot less writing with python than with C#. The problem is I'm just not as confident with python as I am with C#. If you want compiler approved board code then I've got to write it with C# and not python.

jamestimmins2• 8 years ago

My job involves interviewing many engineering candidates, and I see the issue with typing all the time. A competent Java dev is at a disadvantage compared to a competent Python dev, simply because it's statically typed and more verbose, meaning there are more lines of code which means more small problems that can arise. That matters greatly in a short, time-boxed context.

Delmania• 8 years ago

I suspect it's because most Java and C# engineers are "enterprise" engineers who work on mostly CRUD applications. Go and Ruby would be more aligned for a startup. Given that TripleByte's interview process is more technical and computer science oriented, I'm not surprised they score less. It's mainly about the types of problems you solve at work and how well you keep technical knowledge fresh.

fredsanford• 8 years ago

> However, it seems that the average C# or Java engineer who goes through our process does less well than the average Ruby or Go engineer. I have no idea why.
Given that they have the test info... and they're the ones deciding pass/fail... it's a bit strange they "have no idea why". Well, perhaps just this person doesn't?
Are people not finishing the projects? Do the projects have syntax errors in them? Or logical bugs? What metrics do they use for "pass/fail"?

Something I've noticed over time is that a good chunk of the people not too enthusiastic about their work tend to gravitate towards the enterprisey stuff like java, C# or VB while the more enthusiastic may end up in embedded, research or low level code like the guts of an OS or database.

I wonder ....

snarfy• 8 years ago

It's because the process is CS heavy. Slinging business logic together while mapping it through some ORM to satisfy the latest priority shift this sprint is what the average C# and Java engineer excels at. It's more craftsmanship and less computer science.

samfisher83• 8 years ago

C# is very well thought out language. It development team is super experienced in language design. Its head designer Anders Hejlsberg has made other languages. And they borrow stuff from other languages like lambda etc.

lowercased3• 8 years ago

The "live shared coding" angle in VSCode makes it a great option in many areas where there's a need for it. People have been asking jetbrains for this for a decade, and there's nothing on the horizon as far as I can tell.

xtracto2• 8 years ago

We use it in our distributed team and it works wonders for pair programming.

jxramos• 8 years ago

wow, never realized that was a supported feature. I must have glossed over that feature in that then feature release https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/11/15/live-share

33degrees3• 8 years ago

One of my favorite things about VS Code is how usable it is with its default configuration, and how easy it is to customize to my liking. I found Atom and Sublime Text very frustrating in that regard.

dylan-m• 8 years ago

Yep. I really like Sublime, and I probably still would be using it. I had it all set up to sync settings between my devices, with a nice theme, some handy plugins, and excellent syntax highlighters. But at some point I had both a new personal laptop and a new work computer. I had it on the back of my mind that I need to sort out my Sublime configuration again on both of these (which at the time included that weird dance to install Package Control). But then I already had VSCode working pretty well out of the box (including a perfectly good colour scheme), so my motivation to sort out Sublime became less and less until suddenly I was happy just using VSCode.

davidwparker• 8 years ago

Interestingly, I found Atom to be much easier to customize. There are still things in VS Code I can't customize that I used to have in Atom.

That said, I've been on VS Code for a little more than a year now and it's grown on me.

33degrees3• 8 years ago

To be clear, I meant easy in terms of how little I have to do the get it working to my liking. Atom might be easier to customize in general, but it requires more effort overall.

NotANaN• 8 years ago

"Do Emacs and Vim users have some other characteristic that makes them more likely to succeed during interviews?"

I think the Interview Pass Rates chart makes it clear that the answer is a statistical "Yes", at least for Emacs.

emacsuserrrr• 8 years ago

Maybe it’s because the editor was taught to students at places like MIT, Berkeley, etc?

JustSomeNobody2• 8 years ago

You'll need to explain this...

thatsaguy• 8 years ago

More probably because editors with a steep learning curve (emacs/vi) tend to select for people more willing to invest effort in learning.

The same can be said for Go when Go was relatively new. You learnt [Go^H^Hnew thing] because you thought it was interesting or wanted to play, not because you had to.

As a secondary effect, editors in the likes of emacs/vi require a different mindset compared to an IDE when programming on large projects. There's no question that all IDEs in general have an huge advantage for "all things discoverability" (from project layout to built-in doc).

I personally rely much more on documentation and memorization than autocomplete, despite autocomplete-like extensions being available to both emacs/vi for quite a while. There's a steep hill to climb when approaching large, new codebases when working this way, and it definitely doesn't pay off for quick fixes.

That being said, I used anything from IntelliJ, NetBeans to VSCode and when thinking about "good editor" the first thing that comes to mind is: zero latency. If your computer is slower than you, there's a problem somewhere.

waynecochran2• 8 years ago

I learned emacs in the late 1980's -- it is now an ingrained part of my brain. I hate when I have to use an IDE w a different editor -- at least most editors (and GUI components like browser textfields) respond to common emacs key-sequences.

ubernostrum2• 8 years ago

I've been almost exclusively an Emacs user since the turn of the millennium or so, even before I was a full-time professional programmer. I briefly tried out TextMate years ago, and I've tried out VS Code, but I stick to Emacs for day-to-day work, and the keybindings are pretty much hard-wired into me at this point.

At the same time, I hate and actively avoid typical tech interview processes, and I suspect my pass rate if I did a bunch of them would start out low and only grow after a while once I got used to "interview coding" (which is basically a separate skill from actual programming).

So I don't know why they see this effect. My first guess would be that it's a kind of survivorship bias; outside of the occasional splash of someone trendy inspiring some new users, using the classic Unix-y editors seems to correlate with older/more experienced programmers. Who, because they've managed to stick around as long as they have, probably can manage to get hired when they want or need to.

hprotagonist• 8 years ago

There are some warts, but it seems nice from afar. The biggest wart is/was the "FUCK FUCK FUCK" git clean vs git reset UX error: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/32405 . This is a fantastic demonstration of why i exclusively use git from a command prompt -- i know what will happen and nobody's going to reinvent terms to put on buttons that just confuse me.

In my life:

- I'm committed to emacs for org-mode and LaTeX editing and daily use.

- I paid for sublime so i will use it -- and multiple cursors everywhere is a boon for quick and dirty data munging.

- I write serious python code in pycharm.

- I write serious c# in full blown Visual Studio

bassman90003• 8 years ago

amen

people look at me like I'm an old crazy dude because I don't use a git UI or eclipse, or intellij, or from sublime. Git already has plenty of quirks, adding another layer of unknown on top of it is a no-go

freehunter2• 8 years ago

Which is weird because with all of its inconsistencies, git must have been designed with the idea that someone would build a sensible shell over top of it. I can't imagine Linus expected people to interact directly with git when he built it.

emerongi• 8 years ago

I've started using VSCode for git push/pull/branch and staging. This is what I use git for 99% of the time anyways and since they are simple commands, triggering them from VSCode is faster than falling back to CLI.

Staging/diffing is especially convenient with VSCode. `git add -p` used to be my most-used command, but VSCode just makes the process easier.

kstrauser2• 8 years ago

My most famous quote in my work Slack is: "git already has a luxurious client! it’s called git and has lots of shinies."

dagw2• 8 years ago

Heh. As an "old dude" I'd assume that anybody using git directly would be a "young dude" who's been using git all their programming life.

bdcravens• 8 years ago

I've had best results decoupling my tools, so I use a separate git client (in my case, Git Tower). You can also add things like database clients to VSC, but similarly I use Datagrip etc.

kbd3• 8 years ago

This is a fantastic demonstration of why i exclusively use git from a command prompt...

Thanks for this. I've always felt the same way but haven't been able to put my finger on why. As more things get integrated into my editor (I use VSCode) I feel like I should use the shiny features, but for source control I think I'm going to only use the commandline forever. (Edit: though plugins such as GitLens that give you source control info inline are fantastic.)

Along with some nice features I've added, such as my 'git af' (add + fzf) shortcut[1][2], the commandline is very usable (don't have to 'git add' and type filenames manually).

[1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/65b3d0abcb34540b43880792e8...

[2] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/65b3d0abcb34540b43880792e8...

pstadler• 8 years ago

Same here w/o fancy tooling around Git, but a couple of aliases.

I will refuse to use any Git tools or UIs, but the standard CLI, until the end of my career.

Besides that, my IDE/Editor is neither a build tool manager nor should it run my app from within an integrated console having specific settings. The projects people are going to inherit from me will always be editor-agnostic, the environment they run in will never depend on a certain setup that can‘t be documented clearly and they will always run within an isolated context, i.e. the project root.

sdegutis• 8 years ago

Yesterday I came across a screencast I made in 2009 back when Xcode had separate windows for the console and the editor[8], and Interface Builder was a completely separate program external to Xcode. One of the things that stuck out to me was the silly "SCM" option in the NSOutlineView on the left side[2], which I had absolutely never touched. And I remembered from my more recent experiences using Xcode that its git integration is not very useful and overly simplistic.

So I started wondering why Apple would even want to add such a useless feature into an otherwise really powerful and useful editor, even back then in Xcode 3. And I imagined this scenario where they were brainstorming and someone higher up in the Xcode team was like "ok guys, I got word from above that 'source code' is becoming a big thing now, and we need to add it somewhere" and someone was like "how about the project navigation list?" and someone else maybe piped up "but it doesn't really fit hierarchically in the metaphor" and someone else was like "dude it's 4:30pm some of us have families to get back to can we just forget about the metaphorical inconsistencies?" and they just added it as an expandable item.

I use Xcode and VS Code ever day, and I absolutely never use the Git functionality in either of them. I tried both for a few weeks each, but absolutely nothing compares to Magit[4]. Not even command line. For git, Magit is the same secret weapon that pg claimed Lisp was for programming.

[2] https://i.imgur.com/DYJN12N.png

[4] https://magit.vc

[8] https://i.imgur.com/lXcGpDh.jpg

btashton2• 8 years ago

I also very much related to this, the two exceptions I find awkward from the command line are: * Doing partial adds with `git add -p`. I see the hunk it presents see what I want from it, but then sometimes have to go through several iterations of splitting, skipping etc.. A visual tool (even like the tool in vim-fugitive) is a huge improvement. At the end of the day I'm still looking at the staged diff before committing * Looking at diff or blame logs. Once again these are super low risk for unexpected behavior, and for larger changes that span multiple files, I find the shiny editor features make it easy to see the context quickly.

Drdrdrq2• 8 years ago

don't have to 'git add' and type filenames manually

Another option is git add -p, which asks you about each change so you can review them once more and maybe leave some (parts of) them for future commits.

aaaaaaaaaab• 8 years ago

Hint:

    git add -i

Shorel3• 8 years ago

Even if I use git exclusively in the command prompt, I usually have a working copy where I edit files, and another copy that's read only where I switch branches without care, do the binary search bisect thing and so on.

I don't remember what happened for me to start doing this, but it saves so many headaches that I don't care.

All the graphic Git clients cause me panic. I have Sublime-Merge has a read only thing, because it shows diffs in a nice format. But I am still not ready to commit something from it.

matwood• 8 years ago

This is a fantastic demonstration of why i exclusively use git from a command prompt -- i know what will happen and nobody's going to reinvent terms to put on buttons that just confuse me.

This many times. I'll open SourceTree to view a large set of diffs or changes, but still drop back to the CLI to push/pull/rebase/commit/stash/etc... I know what git will do in those cases, and am a little wary of git UIs.

bayindirh• 8 years ago

Actually Eclipse's git UI is very practical. I use it whenever I'm developing somehting in Eclipse, however I still command line as much for other reasons.

OTOH, I despise heavily modified bash/zsh/whatever profiles which makes the environment non-portable. Extreme eye-candy in the console makes stuff harder for devs/admins who logs in to thousands of servers.

212• 8 years ago

I paid for sublime so i will use it -- and multiple cursors everywhere is a boon for quick and dirty data munging

These days pretty much every serious editor has multiple cursors, including Visual Studio Code.

zwieback2• 8 years ago

had to look up "multiple cursors" and it looks like it's the same as "column mode" which has been around in MS editors forever?

ddavis• 8 years ago

Since you're an Emacs user... just wanted to plug magit - it might make you change your mind about command-prompt-only git usage

wry_discontent• 8 years ago

I use Emacs mostly for magit.

Zaheer• 8 years ago

P.S. VSCode has multi-cursor as well: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/tips-and-trick...

markrages• 8 years ago

and emacs of course. https://youtu.be/jNa3axo40qM

pmarreck3• 8 years ago

and multiple cursors everywhere is a boon for quick and dirty data munging.

VSCode has this. Hold down Command on Macs (probably Ctrl on Windows/Linux) and click. You can also select "next similar word" with command-D so you can quickly change all instances of a word to another word.

_coveredInBees2• 8 years ago

Ctrl+Shift+L will select all instances of the highlighted term in one shot. Ctrl+D , as you mentioned, is useful for progressively selecting the highlighted phrase within the file.

_coveredInBees2• 8 years ago

To each their own. I've used CLI git only for a decent amount of time but VSCode's git diff view is fantastic and effortless to use. Their interface for staging files and making commits is excellent and combined with the ease of viewing local changes, it makes it very easy to ensure that commit messages are well documented and accurate. Same goes for handling merge conflicts.

I still use the CLI to push/pull/branch/merge, etc just to have total control, but staging files, viewing diffs and making commits are a lot more annoying in the CLI.

starik36• 8 years ago

fantastic demonstration of why i exclusively use git from a command prompt

What's described in that github issue happened to me as well the first time I used git via Visual Studio. I normally don't do that, but something told me to make a zip of everything before using git in VS. So that saved me big time.

Why in the world are the deletions not pointed to the Recycle Bin??? That's what it's there for.

smbullet• 8 years ago

Agreed, it's sort of surreal that nobody in any of the issue threads admitted that was a good solution.

Sacho• 8 years ago

The deletions are made through git, and windows git does not use the recycle bin, presumably because it's a linux-first tool

dlhavema• 8 years ago

I do command line git as well because I am bouncing between IDEs and dont want to learn the differences in little features of each IDEs source control ui.

anilakar3• 8 years ago

I paid for sublime so i will use it

I purchased Sublime when it was the least bad editor out there, but finally realized that I was suffering from the sunk cost fallacy. I still consider it the worst software purchase I've ever made, and it's also why I'm reluctant to pay a single buck for software nowadays.

thecopy• 8 years ago

Why do you think Sublime Text is the worst software you have purchased? I use it every day as my main text editor and i am very satisfied.

giancarlostoro2• 8 years ago

I mean I use VS Code a lot more often, and PyCharm / JetBrains IDES moreso than I do Sublime Text but I wouldn't say it's the worst purchase. I bought a text editor that's got out of the box syntax highlighting for most languages and decent enough linting plugins to catch some of the syntax errors I may be about to miss.

I only wish Sublime Text were able to (out of the box) mount / SSH into any server like emacs does (using TRAMP). I'm finding myself using VIM lately mostly because it's a step up from nano which uses tabs, not sure how to tell it how to space things, nano is perfect for Go I suppose. I have to figure out how to configure VIM for spacing things properly though, but I mostly install Sublime Text on VM's I write code in.

sireat• 8 years ago

I managed to commit node_modules folder to github using VS Code git integration. Luckily it was on a smaller test project. My fault but there was a UI failure.

All I did was press Commit which apparently decided to stage and commit everything under the root folder.

It didn't do this in other projects so who knows what was different.

This is how credential files must get committed to github every day.

If VS Code is going to be smart about so many other things, then there should be some sort of warning for major code affecting changes.

You are about to push 5000 files to master repo inluding some that appear to be widely used libraries, are you sure that is what you want ?

GordonS• 8 years ago

All I did was press Commit which apparently decided to stage and commit everything under the root folder

If you don't have anything staged and hit Commit, it will show a prompt asking if you want to commit everything that's been changed. It sounds like you hit 'yes' on this prompt by mistake.

rjbwork• 8 years ago

I use TortoiseHg for Hg. Source Tree for git (though I honestly don't like it very much, and often use hg-git to just work with git from TortoiseHg). Sublime for text editing; and agreed on the multiple cursors and great regexing - fantastic for quick and dirty munging indeed. I use VS for writing C#, creating SQL databases, and a myriad of other functions that would take too long to get into. LinqPad for quick experiments or writing up some quick scripts I need to run rarely.

omaranto• 8 years ago

Since you mention both using git directly from the command line and Emacs, have you tried magit?

SomeHacker44• 8 years ago

I am much the same. I have stickers for IntelliJ (as a stand in for all JetBrains IDEs), Emacs and Vim on my laptop because each has a different use case and preferred language. I even have Atom, Sublime and others installed and use them on rare occasions when they have plugins that are useful for a task at hand.

I also exclusively use the command line for source control (of which I use at least four, but mostly git and hg). I just do not trust IDEs to do the right thing, although JetBrains does get close (but my colleague devs hate the properly pruned .idea in the repos).

bishala3• 8 years ago

multi cursor is pretty much a basic feature in all modern text editors these days.

hellofunk2• 8 years ago

With 17% of the pie, VS Code was the editor used by the majority of Triplebyte candidates last year.

Huh? This has broken the world of math for me.

Cursuviam• 8 years ago

They mean plurality.

ammon2• 8 years ago

Just changed it to plurality. Thanks!

hellofunk2• 8 years ago

Almost! :

tl;dr Visual Studio Code usage is rising rapidly! VS Code is now the editor chosen by the majority of engineers during programming interviews, and it appears to be rapidly taking market share from other top editors.

JustSomeNobody2• 8 years ago

Do Emacs and Vim users have some other characteristic that makes them more likely to succeed during interviews?

I think it comes down to users of those editors probably are used to keeping code/libraries in their head more. IDEs tend to suggest a lot to you and if you're not used to having that happen you could get more nervous during whiteboarding rituals.

Edit: I guess this really doesn't apply as their interview process is on the web.

hartator4• 8 years ago

Worked with a bunch of them, always come back to Sublime Text for performance and multi-cursor support.

brink3• 8 years ago

Emacs has multi-cursor support. http://emacsrocks.com/e13.html

hartator4• 8 years ago

Is that native?

disconcision• 8 years ago

Are sublime multi-cursors different from code multi-cursors?

hartator4• 8 years ago

It's a first class citizen in Sublime. There is no lag or weirdness when you are using them.

rjpr• 8 years ago

Can't really speak to performance comparisons, but VS Code has has multi-cursor support for a while now.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

Because of the popularity of VS Code on HN, I decided to give it a try. It's good. Much better than Electron or Atom for my workflow. And much faster IME.

The one thing that keeps me from switching from my current IDE is the lack of Whitesmiths brace formatting. I'd pay up to $15 for a Whitesmiths plugin. Until then, I can't change. But I'll keep checking.

dman• 8 years ago

What language do you write?

munchbunny5• 8 years ago

From a point of anthropological curiosity, do you work in a team where everyone uses that style of brace indentation?

Is it actually common and I've just never encountered it before?

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

I don't think it's common, but one of the projects I work on has the entire codebase and documentation already in Whitesmiths.

I don't know much about the history of how it came to be that way, but it's my understanding that pretty much everyone else who's ever worked on the project came either from big iron, or had big iron in their background. Maybe that's where it came from.

I could just be used to it now, but I find it much easier to follow what's happening in the code than Ratliff or K&R.

Horstmann and Lisp aren't bad, either. They make a lot more sense than some of the other options that litter the screen with braces in seemingly random places.

copperx• 8 years ago

In which codebases is Whitesmiths formatting used? It looks so wrong if you're used to any of the other styles.

PascLeRasc2• 8 years ago

It's popular with ancient Windows C/C++ projects, so of course developers who use this have never seen other styles.

evan_2• 8 years ago

VS Code uses Electron.

reaperducer3• 8 years ago

Thanks for clarifying that. I must be thinking off another editor that used Electron as its base, and only the Electron portion stuck with me.

I went through and deleted all of my unused editors a few months ago, so I wasn't able to go back and make a complete/accurate list of the ones I've tried in the past.

slig• 8 years ago

For those not familiar (as I was), here's what Whitesmiths style looks like (straight from Wikipedia):

    while (x == y)
        {
        something();
        somethingelse();
        }

    finalthing();

master-litty• 8 years ago

The horror!

Dayshine3• 8 years ago

Hey, I'm familiar with VS Code language extensions. Depending on your language you may or may not be able to do this. The controls you have are:

- increaseIndentPattern: If a line matches this pattern, then all the lines after it should be indented once (until another rule matches).

- decreaseIndentPattern: If a line matches this pattern, then all the lines after it should be unindented once (until another rule matches).

- indentNextLinePattern: If a line matches this pattern, then only the next line after it should be indented once.

- unIndentedLinePattern: If a line matches this pattern, then its indentation should not be changed and it should not be evaluated against the other rules.

They are all regex patterns. If you think your language would let you do that, I can try and throw together something for you.

pzone• 8 years ago

VS Code has taken me off Emacs for Python development on Windows. I was never able to get a clean and speedy code completion, navigation, or refactoring to work with Emacs. I hope the situation changes someday.

nickysielicki2• 8 years ago

The same engine that VSCode uses is open source [1]. With lsp-mode [2] or eglot [3], you can have the same stuff working inside emacs. I've actually been writing Java inside emacs lately --- yes, java, and I have had very few issues.

One caveat, development on the emacs LSP stuff is moving very quickly, so I don't recommend using ELPA/MELPA/etc. to install the plugins. I use straight.el [4] to manage my plugins, they're checked out from the upstream source and can be updated at-will. You'll also need an up to date version of emacs, ie: 26+. (That's the current release, but it's not available in some distributions ie: debian/ubuntu yet.)

---

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/python-language-server

[2] https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode

[3] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot

[4] https://github.com/raxod502/straight.el

PurpleRamen2• 8 years ago

Python-lsp with emacs is dreadful bad. It's slow, bugged and doesn't integrate well. Worst is how often the helper dies.

The microsoft-helper is supposed to work better, but it seams harder to setup with linux, so I hadn't the chance yet to try it.

aldanor• 8 years ago

It's hard to beat pycharm especially on Windows...

laythea• 8 years ago

Where is Notepad++??? !!!

thebigspacefuck• 8 years ago

Hanging out with Bloodshed and Code::Blocks

talltimtom• 8 years ago

Well that settles it, I’m off to program some Go code in Emacs.

munchbunny5• 8 years ago

Having gone through Triplebyte's interview process, I'll propose another interpretation: Triplebyte's interview is on aggregate biased against Java and C# developers. I'm not accusing Triplebyte of "being biased", but rather pointing out that Java and C# tend to correlate to a skill set that Triplebyte's test process values less.

My experience of Triplebyte's interview process is slanted towards frontend/backend developers of web apps. Fortunately for me, that was my background. However, in the team I currently work with, the team is in aggregate heavily C# with only secondary experience in web frontend/backend development. That's because their expertise is in low level security. Several developers on this team are exceptions to the "don't roll your own cryptography" adage.

They're all competent developers, but the version of Triplebyte's coding test that I took (and passed) would be in unfamiliar territory for people in this team. That's fine since most of Triplebyte's clients are probably looking for web frontend/backend skills, but I think this means that Triplebyte's test shouldn't be seen as an objective measure of programmer skill, just an objective measure of fit for Triplebyte's clients.

ww520• 8 years ago

Could you give some examples? I keep seeing annoying Triplebyte ads popping up and not sure what it is.

munchbunny5• 8 years ago

What kinds of examples are you asking for? Like specific parts of the interview?

pfarnsworth• 8 years ago

I click on their ads every single time, using incognito mode, whenever I see them, just so that it costs them money. Their ads are completely deceitful in my opinion and nothing but clickbait.

bitwize• 8 years ago

I recall reading something to the effect that the most competent developers by Triplebyte's metrics used vim and Ruby on a Mac. That sounded too much like the typical hipster startup dev to be a coincidence, which got me wondering: is that really a snapshot of the best developers out there, or is it just what Triplebyte, hence their clients, are selecting for?

drewrv• 8 years ago

That was annoying me the entire time I was reading this, the entire article has an unspoken assumption that their interview process couldn't possibly be responsible for any discrepancy in the data.

ChrisCinelli3• 8 years ago

Well, what they hiring for, their questions in a specific language, how and who is evaluating the answers, the fact that a person is looking to work for them vs other companies are all biases. Nobody should try to extrapolate their results to the whole population of software engineers.

That said, Visual Studio is really on the rise. I used to think VSCode was late and could have never catch up with the Sublime's and Atom's ecosystem. So after trying it, I went back to my editor of choice. Lately though I went back to VSCode and I think it is pretty good out of the box and very good when you install the right plugins.

19963• 8 years ago

VSCode is only on the rise because alternatives are really bad. Meanwhile, it offers good defaults, and decent latency on modern hardware but for me it is just a glorified syntax highlighter.

VSCode becoming so popular should not tell us it is a great product, but that most modern alternatives suck.

xapata• 8 years ago

Further, it looks like the questions are biased towards Ruby devs.

hatchnyc• 8 years ago

Interesting. With quick googling, I think these are the founders' GitHub pages?

Harj Taggar https://github.com/kwi

Guillaume Luccisano https://github.com/harj

coding123• 8 years ago

I don't know if this counts, but it might, me and several friends and people I know who have all been doing Java for 10-15 years... are all writing typescript now. And using VSCode to do so.

cbhl• 8 years ago

Frankly, I think we're seeing the results of the new era of Python paradox. Except it's not Python 3, it's TypeScript, VS Code, and React.

If you look at the education space, many of the deployments are either Chromebooks or iPads. Back in 2012, the "learn to code" sites (like Khan Academy or Code.org) ended up building their lesson plans around JavaScript.

https://johnresig.com/blog/introducing-khan-cs/

People who were in 3rd- and 4th-grade in 2012 would now be finishing up high school. Someone in 7th- or 8th- grade would have just finished a bachelor's, or maybe be looking for their second job after two or three years in the industry.

For these folks, TypeScript/VS Code/React would be a short jump from these learn-to-code-JavaScript-in-the-browser sandboxes.

As for Go... I suspect that's the set of people who can handle Google-scale software complexity. So either former Google employees, or people who are in the kubernetes ecosystem.

dcchambers• 8 years ago

This article has some very interesting data beyond just showing the rise of VSCode. Fun read.

interesthrow22• 8 years ago

It's a good text editor, first and foremost. Compared to netbeans, eclipse, visual studio, even intellj idea in my opinion. The same thing that made textmate, then sublime text successful made VSC successful. I takes a few seconds to launch, even on my celeron machine with 2Gigs of RAM, it's relatively minimal and unlike intellj it doesn't appear to be analyzing my whole hard drive for hours for no reason...

the irony is that Microsoft did hire Eclipse creator to work on that product... hopefully it doesn't end up bloated. Having an open spec for language servers is also a smart move. While others have their proprietary, often non speced protocol, now any text editor can implement the same protocol and basically use any language server already developed.

So kudos for Microsoft, it's a great piece of engineering.

AsyncAwait• 8 years ago

It's a good text editor, first and foremost. Compared to netbeans, eclipse, visual studio, even intellj idea

Have to disagree with VSC being better than Intellij. I find Intellij refactoring, debugging and autocomplete far ahead of VSC, especially when it comes to supporting leaser known features, or recently released language changes.

jhall1468• 8 years ago

VSC and Intellij aren't the same thing. If you want better refactoring and debugging there are definitely plugins that do exactly that. Hard disagree on autocomplete, I've never run into a single situation where Intellij did it better.

interesthrow22• 8 years ago

Have to disagree with VSC being better than Intellij.

I didn't say it was a better than Intellij, I said it's a better text editor I'm not talking about integrated development, I'm talking about text editing.

pippy• 8 years ago

I still use Netbeans as my daily driver, but it's been in a death spiral. Now it's the Apache graveyard and will never get modern features like SASS.

Of all the IDEs I've been dabbling with for a replacement, I'm still deciding on Visual Studio Code or PHPStorm.

oselhn• 8 years ago

Actually I really do not like VSC resource consumption and performance. It feels more like eclipse than text editor but it does not offer as many features. If I want something fast and lightweight I reach for vim or sublime. But I do not care about start time as I leave all those program open all the time.

rptr_87• 8 years ago

Agree. All you need to do is just import a project like Chromium or Webkit... and try to navigate files/projects.

Sublime is really good for large projects.

atombender• 8 years ago

VSCode is fast and it's certainly the best editor/IDE I've used since back when I was a Java dev using Eclipse back in 2006 or so.

But I recently opened up Sublime Text to compare some editor behaviour, and the difference in UI performance is astounding.

It's possible that VSCode has regressed a bit the last couple of years. It was always faster than Atom. But comparing it to Sublime shows that there are clear advantages to writing UI code in a natively compiled language. Sublime's widget drawing seems very well optimized.

VSCode has also become slower for me the last few years, simply from the load of extensions. I use the ESLint extension and the Go extension heavily, both of which parse code a lot. Neither is doing any sort of incremental parsing, so there's potentially a lot of churn. There's also some kind of indexing of symbols that happens in the background in the language server or in the extension. I sometimes have to kill the "Code Helper" process because it's sitting there consuming a whole core when idle.

Overall, VSCode is becoming increasingly closer to how I remember Atom, when I used it. I worry that it's slowly turning into Atom, performance-wise.

misnome• 8 years ago

I love VSCode and have moved to it from Sublime; mostly same shortcuts by default, inline debugging, extension ecosystem and blistering pace of development.

It's fast enough but Sublime blows it out of the water - especially for things to "Go To Symbol" where it works almost instantly whereas I'm constantly waiting for VSCode to stop spinning and give up and cmd-f search instead.

Also, I have to work with a lot of network-user-login RHEL6 boxes, and VSCode doesn't work on desktops that old.

Dayshine3• 8 years ago

especially for things to "Go To Symbol" where it works almost instantly whereas I'm constantly waiting for VSCode to stop spinning and give up and cmd-f search instead.

"Go to symbol" isn't implemented by the IDE though. Neither Sublime Text nor VSCode provide that feature.

Plugins do.

What you're probably experiencing is that Sublime Text tends to have less intelligent language servers. Which means they're faster, because they're not scanning your whole project, or because they're not using the official language server.

I've written my own language server so I know firsthand that any UI delay is entirely my fault, not VSCode.

sho• 8 years ago

the difference in UI performance is astounding

I could not agree more. I've made numerous attempts to embrace the new hotness that is VSCode but I just cannot get over the performance. Yes, it has some cool features, the plug-in ecosystem is booming, and it sure looks pretty. But at the end of the day none of it is compelling enough for me to put up with the constant lag.

It's funny because after several of these experiments I have literally wondered to myself if I'm getting stuck in my ways or becoming a so-called "greybeard" due to my long term adherence to Sublime Text, but is constantly getting annoyed with how slow an editor is really a hallmark of old age? I'll wait for your web page to load, I'll wait for an ssh command to return. I will not wait for my bloody text editor. I have no patience whatsoever. Now god damn it NOW!

Another thing I wonder is how many of those VSCode users have simply never used anything better. If all you've ever known is an iPhone 5, you probably think it's pretty great - maybe you think that's just how phones are! This impression will be totally ruined of course when you try an iPhone X...

Waterluvian5• 8 years ago

I feel like if I took a serious shot at sublime I wouldn't be able to go back due to performance snappiness. Then I'd be miserable because I think vscode is superior in many other ways.

Dayshine3• 8 years ago

Which UI elements do you find slow?

The only things I find are slow are Language Server features. Which are just as slow in any IDE because they're using the same underlying application!

cjensen• 8 years ago

Just as an aside, there is this sentence in the article: "On the peninsula, where larger companies tend to be located, you see a lot of Java developers. In San Francisco, where startups dominate, you see more JavaScript."

None of the non-SF cities is on the peninsula. They're 100% in the Silicon Valley / Santa Clara Valley.

shmulkey18• 8 years ago

Newspaper headline: "Emacs text editor makes people smarter."

sinuhe69• 8 years ago

Funny how people analyse data and draw conclusions without applying any statistical method. Yeah, maybe more people use VS Code, but I don't think it has anything to do with people's failure or success.

akerro2• 8 years ago

I don't think it has anything to do with people's failure or success.

Unless the interviewer is a big fan of VSC and they favour other VSC users.

craigsmansion• 8 years ago

The first thing that jumps out from this graph is the prominence of Visual Studio Code.

Maybe to some. 10.2% percent for vim!

For some reason that makes me really happy even though I use emacs. I guess the (d)evil you know...

johngalt• 8 years ago

Engineers who use Go are also especially strong. If you know why, please let me know.

Because there is almost no reason to learn Go. Most shops want JS/Java/Python/C# etc... The primary reason to learn a language like Go is because you want to for it's own sake.

It's not that you must learn Go in order to be good, or that knowing Go makes you better. Rather it's difficult to be bad and still have the desire/interest to spend time learning something unnecessary.

eindiran• 8 years ago

This is what Paul Graham calls the Python Paradox; namely that in 2004, when Python jobs were relatively more rare, you could find smarter Python engineers than Java engineers for any given project.

"[I]f a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job."

http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

pvg2• 8 years ago

Both of these are still just very roundabout ways of telling yourself you're awesome because of whatever mildly unusual thing you think you might be doing.

ChrisCinelli3• 8 years ago

I think that's exactly it. The problem is when these articles come out and everybody try to learn Go and use VS Code so they think can become smarter or at least being perceive as such :-P

mrdoops• 8 years ago

Go is a language designed to take CS college graduates to productive engineers at Google with as little fuss as possible. Considering it was designed for an organization in the scope of Google, it's less likely to be the best option for something like a startup, small business, or even a medium size business.

mawburn• 8 years ago

I feel like you should spend some time with Go. If I were building a startup, I would probably choose Go for core infra for being able to move quickly as a developer and write incredibly performant code with about as much mental overhead as most dynamically typed languages.

Anecdotally, I've seen it replace Java in quite a few small and medium sized established companies.

Apocryphon• 8 years ago

Does this hold true for Dart, one wonders.

SiVal• 8 years ago

"Because there is almost no reason to learn Go."

No, that's not it. It's that if you can only learn one programming language, Go is not a very good choice, so those who learn Go are almost always multilingual ("lingual" as in programming languages, not natural languages). Python and JavaScript are Swiss Army knives with outstanding ecosystems that make them excellent choices if you can only afford one tool. There are plenty of reasons to learn Go but, as a more specialized tool, it makes a better component of a nice toolset than a solitary multitool.

My anecdotal experience says that 1) most programmers are monolingual, 2) almost all Go programmers are multilingual, and 3) the average multilingual programmer is a better programmer than the average monolingual programmer for various reasons, so the average Go programmer is better than the average programmer. And, by that logic, the average Rust, Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, etc., programmer would be, too.

danans2• 8 years ago

My anecdotal experience says that 1) most programmers are monolingual,

This surprises me as I've never worked on a nontrivial system that's also a monolingual system.

There's nearly always another language to use to get the job done, whether for configuration, scripting/automation, or because backends and UIs are written in different languages, especially for internet-based software.

golergka• 8 years ago

Wouldn't it be Rust or Haskell by this logic?

akerro2• 8 years ago

I really feel like learning Go and Rust made be better Java developer.

Shorel3• 8 years ago

In that case, D developers should all be programming geniuses.

Because even less people use D than they use Go. :)

kcon• 8 years ago

It seems strange to me to compare VSCode against PyCharm, IntelliJ, and Android Studio separately. While PyCharm, IntelliJ, and Android Studio are distinct applications, I believe they share much of their code, UI, 3rd party plugins, and workflows for all being JetBrains language-flavored IDEs.

On the other hand, VSCode supports different languages through its extensions instead of having separate language-flavored applications like "VSCode Python", "VSCode Java", or "VSCode Android".

So I feel that reaching for IntelliJ vs. PyCharm vs. Android Studio is roughly equivalent to installing a particular set of extensions in VSCode. If you look at it that way, the data from the article seems to tell a different story - while VSCode has grown significantly in popularity, JetBrains IDEs seem to dominate in terms of overall usage (11.3% + 6.9% + 4.1% = 22.3% vs. VSCode's 16.8%).

lowercased3• 8 years ago

I didn't see any js or php specific stuff in their list, but have to assume phpstorm or webstorm might be in their 'other' category as well, pushing JB up to closer to 25%(?)

kumarvvr• 8 years ago

I use PyCharm and VSCode and I find that for python apps, PyCharm is much better. Lots of more features, easy to use commands, etc.

Having a dedicated IDE for a given language has it's pros.

However, I use VSCode for JS/HTML development, as it has a lot less clutter, than compared to other IDE's.

jokoon• 8 years ago

Like it was said in this thread, as long as you have an editor that is built on something js-related like electron or node-js, it just cannot beat alternatives that are made in C++.

I've tried VSCode because I wanted to have UI breakpoints with GDB, I admit that vscode seems better than atom, but for performance I have my doubts.

I really don't understand why engineers choose to use JS to made a text editor. I know that js and the dom have enabled the web, but it's because there was nothing better, choosing js to do non-web stuff doesn't only sound silly, IT IS silly.

212• 8 years ago

Do you think it's a coincidence that some of the most used and loved desktop applications lately are written in JS/HTML? import_pkt_ws_btc_deribit_v2.py Could it be that it's extremely hard to do these kind of applications in traditional GUI frameworks?

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

Could it be that many JS devs don't bother to learn how GUI frameworks are able to do stuff where Web is still catching up with the 90's?

pjmlp3• 8 years ago

Go for DDD as GUI for gdb.

nojvek• 8 years ago

Everyone is on the argument that because you use C++ you'll always be faster.

I disagree, you get fast by using good datastructures and algorithms. Yes, for the same algorithm C++ may have some perf gains but it's so easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Visual Studio itself is written in Visual C++. It's slow and a memory hog.

Most folks who are not familar with JS don't understand the internals of V8. V8 does amazing things to compile the JS down to really fast bytecode. It builds hidden classes and structs just the way you'd write C++ and them compile them to machine code. There are many instances where the C++ code won't be much faster than the JS. In some cases naive C++ is even slower.

As for VSCode, it's a testament to show you can build very usable things by using the web as a platform. Chromium's blink's engine is fast if you know what you're doing.

Sublime is great, don't get me wrong, but VSCode's extension architecture gives it a leg up. It's so much easier to write a vscode extension than a sublime extension. Typescript gives the JS world a lot of sanity.

Shorel3• 8 years ago

I really don't understand why engineers choose to use JS to made a text editor.

Not to sound snarky or anything, but because of their sheer numbers the argument is that it makes them a lot closer to the infinite amount of monkeys with an infinite amount of typewriters.

bishala3• 8 years ago

I really don't understand why engineers choose to use JS to made a text editor. -Much more beautiful and customizable UIs compared to native applications -Easier cross platform development with Electron

zygotic123• 8 years ago

I've told you guys before - my 10 year old son scored 'well above average' on their interview process. We live in the UK but they are still trying to recruit him. And no - he cannot write code.

zygotic123• 8 years ago

My son has seen this post and points out that he not only uses unreal engine - to my complete surprise (and not just a little delight) - he has deployed some c++. I sent him to bed because it's late. Dad;s will know why.

Double_a_92• 8 years ago

The interview process reminded me of the theoretical exam for a drivers license. If you pick the option that sounds least crazy, you're fine.

zygotic123• 8 years ago

I wonder if you just nailed being a prog

d_burfoot• 8 years ago

It's interesting to me that Go does so well. I have a buddy who convinced his shop to switch over to Go for the following reason: he knew that they were not going to be able to consistently hire good programmers, and he thought Go was a way to mitigate the problems arising from this situation. In other words, Go is a language where newbie programmers can still do okay. He also claimed that Google developed Go for this reason, referencing the infamous Ron Pike quote ("They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language, but we want to use them to build good software").

triodan• 8 years ago

Go makes it really hard to do stupid things, and that makes it a really good language.

satysin• 8 years ago

I have tried VSCode a few times for C++ on macOS and always found it more hassle than it was worth to get it up and running.

I saw it had debugging options and I thought that looked pretty cool but it is a bit of a mess with tasks.json and some other file I have forgotten about now. I recall I did finally get a working setup but it wasn't portable between folders/projects as the binary filenames were hardcoded and I just lost interest in fixing it.

I think the VSCode team could make this a lot smoother. I want my tools to simplify these things for me with automatic configuration like every other editor seems to be able to do. Not sure why VSCode needed a couple of json config files to know to use /usr/bin/gcc on the current C++ file when no other programmers editor does.

jtsylve• 8 years ago

I'm not sure when the last time you've tried, but in the last year VSCode has come a long way towards "just working" out of the box for C++. They've specifically focused on it. If you've got some time, I'd recommend that you checkout Rong Lu's CppCon 2018 talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JME1i3vCRR8

thedirt0115• 8 years ago

What editor do Go devs use??? Their numbers for Go only add up to 12%! https://d25hn4jiqx5f7l.cloudfront.net/file_attachments/files...

fanf2• 8 years ago

Yes, that chart shows that they have relatively few people doing their interviews in Golang, so their outlier pass rate should have correspondingly large error bars (which you have to imagine because the graphs were drawn without any statistical sophistication).

ExcilSploft• 8 years ago

vim

ChrisCinelli3• 8 years ago

I like VSCode a lot. The only reason why I sometimes switch to other alternative is the multi-file search results. When the fix this, I will be a happy camper: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/63465

lostgame2• 8 years ago

The only issue I have with VS code is it's awful UI/UX performance - it behaves like an Electron app or something.

I realize that's a fair insult around these crowds, but it really does have that lack-of-polish, weird-UI/UX feeling. I know Microsoft would obviously never build an IDE off it, but I'm almost curious to see what on earth they did wrong.

Comparing it side-by-side with Xcode is certainly the easiest way to tell.

vtesucks• 8 years ago

Because it is indeed an electron app

lostgame2• 8 years ago

Wow. Any and all respect for the app - lost.

CrazyCatDog• 8 years ago

Sure, maybe it is the old-school nature of Vim and Emacs that makes then standout in performance, but why not throw a years-since-graduation variable into the equation to find out with greater certainty?

nickpsecurity• 8 years ago

"Do Emacs and Vim users have some other characteristic that makes them more likely to succeed during interviews? Perhaps they tend to be more willing to invest time and effort customizing a complex editor in the short-term in order to get returns from a more powerful tool in the long-term?"

One thing I noticed on Lobste.rs is that a lot of them like the old school editors. That's normal. What was more interesting was that they were constantly sharing and discussing their customizations that made them more productive. Kept making me want to have another go at those editors. I didn't since I came from Windows with big, full-featured editors that could do everything (or Notepad++ or Notepad). Still, I keep reading those comments since there's always new and interesting things people are coming up with.

In other words, I think the author is onto something worth further investigation and comparisons. Especially comparing VS Code programming to experienced folks using highly-customized, full-featured setups in the other stuff. I bet the results would be more interesting than a random person tried using Emacs or whatever.

Miltnoid• 8 years ago

I recently helped make a VS Code extension during a Microsoft internship, and I found the language server interface really easy to use. It really makes it easy to write an extension.

eterm• 8 years ago

These conclusions are frustrating to read because they haven't handled the numbers properly at all and have drawn poor conclusions.

Take a scenario where Java/C# are popular and have 20 people applying for each position but Go isn't and only has 5 people applying for each position.

You'd then have a far far better "pass rate" for Go developers. But it doesn't actually say anything about Java or Go in terms of developer proficiency.

welder• 8 years ago

I was also surprised to see how much VS Code has grown in popularity among WakaTime users in such a short amount of time. [1]

https://wakatime.com/static/img/wakatime-editor-usage-2018-1...

kyberias2• 8 years ago

Ok I stopped reading when they started drawing graphs how well the people using certain editors fared better in their test as if the editor could have anything to do with it.

jgtrosh• 8 years ago

Depending on the task and the familiarity of the user with the editor, it can make a big difference! As an extreme example, a good 80s programmer might work efficiently on a file in ed, but nowadays approximately no human could do that.

kyberias2• 8 years ago

But their tests don't measure "how efficiently" the candidates edit files, do they?

tminima• 8 years ago

Later they did mention that they don't take into account the language or editor selection to make interview decisions.

They are just exploring the data they have acquired. May be they could have phrased that section differently.

brianzelip• 8 years ago

The killer feature for my switch from Atom was the built in terminal. Enough to let me be ok using a ms product temporarily to try it out. I appreciate their energy behind it - the update schedule, the changelog write ups, the listening to the feedback from the users.

I really liked the json config of atom. the code gui isn't my fave but it's ok.

Two other things helped me transition easily:

- click a button to edit `PATH` or whatever so that `$ code` opens up the editor from the terminal

- atom keymapping

The coffee script use in atom was unfamiliar territory for me too, so that part seemed distant.

adrianhel• 8 years ago

What I would gladly pay 100$/month for is Vim with correct syntax highlighting, intellisense and nice plugins (such as fuzzy finder) by default.

It would not need to be Vim, but I have only tried one Vim emulator that didn't suck and was terminal-first: emacs with evil-mode. Let that be the bar for vim-emulation.

Why is nobody doing this? I think this would appeal to a lot of people.

The criteria for me to to pay for something like this would be:

1. Terminal first. It would either have to become my main shell or open fast within my shell.

2. Vim based or with GOOD Vim emulation. Macros, remapping and all normal mode key combinations must be implemented.

3. Fast terminal<->editor loop. I don't want to wait >300ms to edit a file.

4. Actual production quality zero-config syntax highlighting, intellisense and fuzzyfinder.

Sign me up!

yayana• 8 years ago

Intellij, pystorm, Android Studio (and half of "Other") make up more than a quarter and are the same jetbrains editor with different plugins pre-installed and some plugins unavailable..

That is more than VSCode and these identical IDEs are all over the place in these charts.

So what was I supposed to have learned from this article?

avshyz• 8 years ago

Anyone who still uses VSCode, probably haven't read about all the features IntelliJ and its ilk offer. The local history, for example, and its integration with the test runner (knowing at which point of your editing process your tests started to break) has saved me a tremendous amount of time. (I've accidentally erased changes that were uncommitted with a stroke of a `checkout -f`, and managed to save hours of work with that feature alone.)

The Rise of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

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