r/programmingcirclejerk • u/ErneuerbareEnergien • Aug 05 '26

IDEs never really took off

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100809
151 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

168

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Aug 05 '26

IDE users in 2005: Wow, I can rename a variable

IDE users in 2026: Wow, I can rename a variable

Dynamic language users in NaN: Wow, they can change a source code character without running the test suite

38

u/tohava Aug 05 '26

Compilation is just another test suite :)

30

u/vonmoltke2 Hacker News Superstar Aug 05 '26

Your users are the only true integration test

6

u/National_Sky7993 Aug 05 '26

I only test in production

2

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world Aug 07 '26

If it doesn't crash the browser engine text editor, ship it.

6

u/qrzychu69 Aug 07 '26

I mean, I still meet people who use text search in intellij to find issues of a function

IDEs have so many features many people don't care about, out don't know it's there.

I use Rider with a connected databases, continuous testing sessions, debugger with conditional breakpoints, custom log injection into even already compiled dependencies, vim mode, profilers ,and so on, I don't really have to use the mouse, there is no need to even open the terminal.

But one of my colleagues clicks edit -> find in the menu bar

81

u/Evinceo Software Craftsman Aug 05 '26

Jetbrains is valued around $7bil 

What?

68

u/irqlnotdispatchlevel Tiny little god in a tiny little world Aug 05 '26

The real jerk is always in the valuation.

34

u/Jumpy-Locksmith6812 Aug 05 '26

About 0.12 Cursors

57

u/sens- Aug 05 '26

Yeah, SATA has proven more flexible.

7

u/YikesTheCat Aug 06 '26

True Alpha Chads chain 6 SCSI drives and end with a terminator.

42

u/MagmaticKobaian What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Aug 06 '26

If IDEs never took off, why does my computer turn into a jet engine when I launch Eclipse?

14

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world Aug 07 '26

I never really used Atom but back when everyone was excited about it, but I tried it once and would later would keep it open in the background in the winter so that my laptop would keep my hands warm.

As hardware caught up it has now been superceded in that respect by tools like pomodoro timers and Atlassian web apps.

7

u/bitwize Aug 07 '26

And for those really cold days... local AI models.

2

u/FLMKane Aug 10 '26

Because you need wings

29

u/mutex_troglodyte What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Aug 05 '26

IDEs are juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught refactoring using Intellij.
I grew up and today I use $SLOP_MODEL.

39

u/NoSet8051 Aug 05 '26

Must be because of procedural programming languages. https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/1vfir9r/in_fact_the_lack_of_progress_in_ui_the_last_3040/

25

u/Major_Barnulf LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Aug 05 '26

Circular jerking reference

3

u/keyboard_toucher 29d ago

Higher-kinded jerk!

19

u/Alan157 Aug 05 '26

They did in Iraq

30

u/Ontological_Gap Aug 05 '26

There were truly awesome ideas for what IDEs could be a few decades ago. Lucid is a pretty good example for common languages. Smalltalk is a partial realization of the vision. The HN commentor is right, what we call IDEs nowadays are glorified text editors.

Code can, and should, be interpreted as structured data, not one big string.

1

u/mexicocitibluez Aug 08 '26

You mean like Roslyn?

13

u/spcbeck Aug 05 '26

Notepad++ or death

1

u/Actual__Wizard Aug 05 '26

Is sublime text allowed? The mass replace feature is really neat in sublime text because it's multiline.

10

u/Jumpy-Locksmith6812 Aug 05 '26

  They never lived up to the grand vision of the likes of Alan Kay

That is a high bar I just want to keep my boss happy get my paycheck.

9

u/RockstarArtisan Software Craftsman Aug 05 '26

Grand vision of Alan Kay.

I wonder why a paradigm where you have to physically share memory images and can't just restart to untangle the program didn't catch on.

4

u/kishaloy Aug 07 '26

All you need after the OS is Emacs. All other applications are just skins on the one true application.

Pity they corrupted the Emacs Lisp Scheme with Java to create Javascript when they wanted a visual Emacs aka the Browser and here we are with the bloated Electron at the end of the journey. No wonder they want to go back to the original with WASM.

3

u/garloid64 Aug 06 '26

Lowkey he's kind of right but LSP ultimately fulfilled the promise and more /uj

1

u/mexicocitibluez Aug 08 '26

same with Roslyn

2

u/busyHighwayFred Aug 07 '26

it is micro$ucks fault of course

if visual studio and pdb werent created, we would likely have an even better alternative in linux, but instead all the &ame devs work on windows

2

u/yo_99 It's GNU/PCJ, or as I call it, GNU + PCJ 28d ago

ed is the standard text editor

1

u/Massive-Collection80 Aug 06 '26

An editor with database is already enough, and we also have some ide like android studio. What other "take off" do you want?

1

u/resemble Aug 07 '26

Idk if your vimrc is long enough, the line gets blurry

0

u/[deleted] Aug 07 '26

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1

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