What people mean when they say “I can’t believe how good this is” is:
“I can’t believe how good this is for something I got for free”
That’s not engineering excellence. It’s just engineering; being given away as a loss leader.
Vscode is good and well maintained, but that’s because a lot of money is being spent making it so.
Enjoy it; there’s no harm in taking money people are giving away. …just don’t presume they’re either a) doing it for love, or b) going to keep doing it indefinitely.
It's not like commercial alternatives are automatically better though, see Visual Studio (some aspects of VStudio are still better than VSCode, but VSCode has caught up fast, and as IDE for multi-language projects it is already better - the only important feature that's still inferior in VSCode compared to VStudio is the debugger integration).
If the current 'trajectories' remain roughly the same, VSCode will leave Visual Studio entirely in the dust in a couple of years.
I think that's a pretty bad choice of comparison. For one, they're two products under the same company. Secondly, Visual Studio is a bit of a dinosaur that suffers (and somewhat benefits) from a long history so it's easy for the VSCode team to look at that and just trim the fat and correct mistakes. They also target somewhat different domains with Visual Studio having a longer history in C++ and VSCode being more geared towards web dev (yes I know it's widely used for other languages but web is the leader and obvious target). Visual Studio is also by far not the best in its class, using IntelliJ products side by side with Visual Studio is like night and day especially when it comes to C++. A better comparison for VSCode would be something like Sublime Text since it's in the same product space of "lightweight" code editors with a focus on web.
Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
Literally never would be my answer.
People like vscode because of the time and effort that has been spent making it friendly and approachable, yet still powerful.
Those are not just things that magically happen.
They didn’t happen because it’s free.
Those are things you get from a paid product team that prioritises issues, ux, etc. and a company that pays to implement them.
> How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
It's pretty damn seamless with Vim. I code on a Mac these days, but was using Windows (w/ WSL) and Ubuntu about 50/50 before that. The same Vim (neovim) config script followed me everywhere.
Agreed. Vim was probably the most seamless of any software. If all I could see was the vim window, I wouldn't be able to say whether it was running on Linux or Mac. I don't think it gets any better than that.
> Yes, and when was the last time a large room of new developers told you how amazed they were at how great Emacs was? How easy it was to setup vim plugins? How seemless the experience was between Mac and windows and Linux?
This seems like a reflection of your environment. This has happened to me more than once with both Vim and Emacs (and not just at a Vim conference:-D). The environment at the time one was a C++ shop, another was a Ruby conference. For example people were amazed when they heard about how you can call vim APIs with Ruby!
Literally yesterday I set up Emacs on my new laptop, the Doom Emacs distribution. It took around 10 minutes overall.
The thing that surprises me most is the fact that people don’t want to learn the tools. I get the point that Emacs/Vim ecosystem is difficult to get used to because of well, multiple reasons. But it worths the time because these tools are amazing. You need to invest a couple of hours in Vim, probably some more in Emacs, but it’s just one time investment and then you have an instrument (or two) to rely on.
The thing to keep in mind with VS Code is that they built a new IDE on a rather humble platform, and somehow managed to leapfrog every other IDE in the market (for JS and Python anyhow) in terms of functionality while keeping performance good. It may not be a marvel of engineering, but it is a marvel for having strong product vision and top notch execution while also being well engineered.
It made me sad as well. It’s interesting that it did. I think it’s related to the fact that I read it in HN I guess, and what kind of commentary do I seek and enjoy when roaming around here. Although of course I respect the commenter’s opinion, and we can all politely disagree and have different points of view, for some reason when I read this one I felt a certain degree of sadness.
Of course, this is an earlier generation. But if the commenter is correct that VS Code is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time, then what the heck are we doing. And if the commenter is incorrect, then what the heck are we doing as a community in our duty to educate to the extent that the commenter doesn't realize that massive projects like this have been implemented, and continue to be implemented.
We have rockets that land by themselves, trucks making cross-country autonomous trips without intervention, multiple systems that can securely run arbitrary sandboxed code from anywhere in the world by simply typing a URL. I'd want someone to be excited not by an IDE for an IDE's sake, but what they can build with their IDE.
I think the point here is that there are two ways to measure impact. One is just a raw "how impressive is this code" score. In that case, self-landing rockets, self driving trucks, etc, all score much higher than VSCode.
On the other hand, an equally valid measure of impact is utility * number of people. While things like self-driving trucks are extremely cool, as of today their overall impact is quite small. VSCode impacts an enormous amount of people every single day and saves them a ton of time.
Well put. Though by that second metric, I'm not sure that the marginal utility of VSCode, relative to a world where Atom existed and was equally free and accessible, would place it in the highest echelon of widespread-utility-creating engineering marvels.
Visual Studio is right there. A lot of the features you love about VSCode are present in Visual Studio. But Visual Studio is a much more robust piece of software.
So while VSCode is nice, it's not even the most impressive piece of software bearing the Visual Studio branding.
That must be one of the saddest things I read this month.