[OT] Which IDE / Editor do you use?

[Manu]

On 21 September 2013 19:05, Nick Sabalausky <
SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Sep 2013 11:04:10 +1000
> Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 20 September 2013 22:15, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> > >
> > > There is no argument here, actually. The problem is really
> > > historical -- names like 'du' or 'grep' or 'awk' meant something
> > > back in who knows when, but they no longer mean anything to us
> > > today (well, those of us not old enough *cough*). If I were to
> > > reinvent Unix today, I'd choose better names for these things. But
> > > think about it, if the above line were instead written like this:
> > >
> > >         diskUsage $HOME | sort --reverse --numeric | pager
> > >
> > > it would make so much more sense, wouldn't it? So the "nonsensical"
> > > part is really just in the poor choice of naming, not an inherent
> > > weakness of the interface.
> > >
> >
> > I'd still argue that it is. It is how it is, and it's completely
> > prohibitive to casual or new users.
>
> So? Does everything have to be targeted at new/casual users? Can't
> experienced users have stuff that's made for them? Who ever said
> command lines are still intended for everybody? Keep in mind, a
> programmer is NOT a casual or new user. But in any case, please don't
> mistake "Windows vs Linux" as a "one size fits all" topic, because you
> seem to be steering things that way.
>
> Rant: Seems to be a big trend in computing these days. Everything is all
> about catering to Average Joe Numbskull and Little Miss Facebook, and to
> hell anyone who has more advanced experience and needs where "usable
> by anyone's grandmother" is the least of their concerns.
>
> Average Joes need their tools, sure, but so do the rest of us.
>
> You do realize that in the time you've spent taking a friendly OS
> discussion and single-handedly trying[1] to turn it into yet another
> ill-informed OS flamewar (congratulations, btw) you could have already
> learned quite a bit about using a unix command line?
>
> [1] Don't deny it. Your intent to bait was obvious a few posts back, but
> due to your good standing here I've been giving you a chance.
>

;)
Sure, I do like to stir the pot to some extent, I won't deny that, but my
primary position in this thread is actually just a recount of my own
experience trying to use linux _productively_.
I just reviewed my last few posts, I don't think I was being particularly
unreasonable. I'm trying to use linux, right now, and it's frustrating. If
it just worked, I wouldn't be frustrated.

I've said about 3 times already, and I'll say again, I actually *really*
like the idea of linux, I really do wish to see it succeed. I've made deals
with myself on numerous occasions to try and force myself to adapt.
The problem is, every time I make a good solid effort, I just become
frustrated with inevitable problems, and end up wasting so much time. And
the end point, even if I were somewhat more expert at fighting the OS, is
I'm left with a suite of tools which are simply inferior and less
productive by a huge huge margin to what I'm used to. I wish this weren't
the case. (I've already acknowledged loads of cool projects that look
promising, but isn't that ALWAYS the way with linux? And I'm talking about
things that were rock solid over 10 years ago)
Philosophically, I hate windows, apple, and everything they stand for. I'd
love to be all-out linux. I'm honestly just expressing my frustration with
the offering, and that people seem to genuinely think it's okay.
I'm not flame baiting (well, maybe a little bit, just because it always
gets a good reaction), I don't think my criticisms are unrealistic. And
they're not even really baits, I'm just sharing personal experience.

I'm also not 'average-joe-numskull', at least I don't like to think I am,
but that doesn't mean I want to know how a car is built, and then in turn
how each individual part was built, and how to fix it, before I can have
confidence it will get me to Sydney in one piece.
I don't actually really care about how linux works, or any of the little
bits and pieces that form it's awkward foundation... and I shouldn't need
to in order to like the premise of an open system, and want to use it on
that merit alone.
I don't actually enjoy OPERATING a computer, I enjoy the creative process
of working, and getting work done. Solving interesting problems. If the
computer gets in my way, it has failed me at some level.
That might sound strange coming from a software engineer, but I guess
that's how I see it. I just don't have the patience to mess with my OS
anymore.
I enjoyed _operating_ my Amiga 15-20 years ago. You should have seen how
pimp my desktop was!
I don't like operating computers anymore, I like using them.

I likewise don't want to know how the video driver interacts with the
kernel, and that I'm supposed to download source code to manually build
some driver shim to correct a fault of the system auto-update tool failing
to resolve a dependency correctly.
Or my re-mapped hotkeys mysteriously reverting to their default settings
every few minutes after I map them for no apparent reason (I don't even
know where to start looking for that).
Or half the software on my PC looking ugly and broken while half of it
looks fine (I tracked this down to the theme control panel not properly
applying style settings to both gnome and Qt, it managed to leave Qt
styling in an invalid state, somehow).

I can't count the number of times that linux has crapped out by applying a
large update all at once in the last 5 years.
I think the daily linux users apply a small number of updates regularly,
and it seems to work better that way. But for someone who primarily uses
windows, when I switch to linux it wants to install a crap load of updates
all at once, and it often goes wrong.
I suspect updating versions 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 is the common path, but
updating 1 -> 3 -> 4 -> 9 it not so well tested, and often fails.

You can try and dismiss this all, and go "yeah well, obviously it's hard
for people to find the time to work on this and that and make it as solid
as what a commercial company can possible achieve with loads of money, and
everyone is disconnected little groups just trying to cooperate and
communication is hard and", blah blah, but in *practise*, it doesn't make
one bit of difference to me.. it always breaks on me for one reason or
another, and wastes my time. And there are few things more frustrating to
me than having me time wasted by problems that were otherwise solved
decades ago...

In a lot of ways, in this thread I'm effectively venting frustration, sorry
if you're offended by it.
I'm still using linux, right now even, trying to overcome some issues with
my opengl rendering driver; versioning problems perhaps, wrangling
extensions, trying to understand how the drivers relate to the problems,
and where the source of various pieces of the puzzle all stem, if it's
reasonable to expect various extensions to be present in conjunction or if
I absolutely need to consider every single one of them in isolation.
Why is my opengl driver reporting version 3.3? My PC is really modern...
and my OpenGL code works on windows.
I have fuck-all tools available, it's near impossible to debug. Something
that I know would take me 5 minutes in windows with that toolset has taken
me a whole day so far...
I honestly don't understand how linux users think it's okay. That's not
inflammatory, it's legitimate amazement.
The only way I can reason that people can be happy being so unproductive,
is that they don't actually know what it's like to be really productive in
the first place. (see: my comment prior about the mouse scroll-wheel)
That might sound insulting, accusing people of being unproductive when I'm
sure they feel like they are, and I'm almost certainly wrong, sure, they're
probably just adapted to a totally different flow, but I just can't see it,
and I have no other working theories.

If I had visual studio and PIX, I would take a screen capture, clicked on
the bad pixel, it would immediately present a stack of every rendering
event contributing to that pixel, and the entire state of the rendering
hardware at every step of the way, and I'd find the problem in a couple of
minutes.
Here, I find myself writing heaps of code just to debug my code! Seriously?

</endrant>

(disclaimer: you caught me after dinner, and a few wine's down, which may
have resulted in a few extra paragraphs ;)

> [...]
> > > > I had a video card driver problem the other day. The bundled
> > > > auto-update app failed, and totally broke my computer.
> > > > I had to download kernel source, and run some scripts to compile
> > > > some
> > > sort
> > > > of shim that made the video driver compatible with my kernel to
> > > > get it working again... absolutely astounding.
> > >
> > > Uh... you do realize that this is because Linux actually *lets* you
> > > fix things? If something like this happened on Windows, the only
> > > real solution is to nuke the system from orbit and start from
> > > ground zero again (i.e. reinstall). One can hardly expect that
> > > repairing a broken car engine should require no thought.
> > >
> >
> > Nothing like that has EVER happened to me in a few decades of windows.
> > In my experience asa linux user, these sort of problems are a daily
> > chore.
> >
>
> I've had stuff like that happen on Windows. Not on my own system within
> the last few years, but over "a few decades"? Oh hell yea.
>
> OTOH, I don't think I've had such trouble with Linux in at least as
> long. I think 2002 was probably the last time.
>

I have a strong suspicion that linux works better if you use it daily.
I'm starting to realise a pattern emerging that things tend to fuck up
after I perform a bulk round of updates.
This tends to happen more often as an in-frequent linux user. Every time I
boot it up, it wants to update loads of stuff.
I suspect the installation tools handle incremental updates better than
when you're skipping over a bunch of intermediate revisions... at least,
that's my current working theory.
That said, I don't think that excuses the situation. It's broken, and it
wastes my time. That's the bottom line. I don't have a PhD in linux, and
when it breaks, it's very time consuming for me to fix it.

> Speaking of which, I managed to totally break my computer last night /
> > > this morning too.
> >
> >
> > No shit. Should I be surprised? ;)
> >
> [...]
> >
> > > but the hardy little thing just kept going. It was
> > > causing subtle breakages like my printer mysteriously failing to
> > > work, and when I finally figured out the problem, I downloaded a
> > > new kernel and recompiled it.
> >
> >
> > ... speechless ;)
> >
> >
> [...]
> >
> > I rest my case.
> >
>
> Ok, now I know you're just trying to troll. But I've never seen you
> troll before so you should know better.
>

Those 2 comments are about 30% trolling, and 70% amazement that people
think this story is actually okay.
There's also an element of sympathy, the idea that he managed to break his
computer is not foreign to me; it's expected ;) (even if he did go slightly
out of his way to do so)

I can very happily say, I have NEVER compiled a windows kernel.

Objectively though, I'd like to think that this whole scenario described
simply shouldn't have been possible under any normal usage scenario in the
first place.
There's obviously a whole bunch of fail-safe's that are totally missing for
your problem to arise in the first place.
This is possibly the core of most of my points in this thread too.

I'm going to say again, that I do understand WHY linux is how it is, I also
consider it a valiant effort/experiment.
I like it in theory, I like it in essence, but it just never manages to
deliver in practise. At some point, I have to admit that it's just
unacceptable so many years down the line.
I don't like the direction MS are taking windows at all. More than ever, I
really want to become a full-time linux user and embrace the choice that it
offers in many aspects... but first, I just want it to work!
And I shouldn't have to work to make it work.

He made it perfectly clear he had been messing around with his own
> internals. *Plus* you know perfectly well messing around with Windows
> internals can also lead to problems requiring expert-skill recovery
> techniques, so really, you *know* that you know better, so cut the
> shit.
>
> Yes, Linux sucks. And guess what? So does Windows. I use both, by
> choice. End of story.
>

This point. This is the part I object.
Again, I'm just recounting my experience/frustrations.
If i were flaming/trolling/baiting, I would be trying to say that linux is
shit, windows is awesome, you suck for liking linux, blah blah. I'm not.
Actually, I'm not happy with windows at all. But it has just one critical
advantage, it WORKS (at least, out of the box).

>
> > I think the main difference is quality-assurance. Windows software is
> > more likely to be released only after it's reasonably proven that it
> > works.
> >
>
> Like Debian.
>

I've tried to use debian, precisely for this alleged stability.
My experience was a whole bunch of software that was simply out of date.
Modern software/tools doesn't actually work against the out-dated packages.
And the result is even less features than the cutting edge releases.
I'm sure it's great if I just want to run a webserver and vi. Sadly I'm a
user-facing software developer, and that requires being on the cutting edge
of computer technology.
Basically, my experience was that if it's not in the debian package
repository, even if you do manage to get it to work, it's likely LESS
stable than on a cutting-edge distro since it's rarely tested against such
outdated libraries.
Maybe this isn't the case anymore, but it was last time I gave it a shot.

And if you bring up some broken Linux distro, I'll bring up WinME, and
> then we'll all have added a whole lot of usefulness to the discussion ;)
>

I don't think that's a fair comparison at all, that's like saying there was
one broken version of ubuntu 10 years ago, but it's all better now...

> I'm not a mechanic, and I shouldn't have to be to drive a car.
> >
>
> Strawman, in too many ways to be worth listing.
>

I can't agree. I just want to do my work uninterrupted.
If my car breaks down half way to Sydney, I'd better hope to god I have
phone reception, because I'll have to start calling mechanics and service
people to get me moving again, and let's just hope I wasn't pressed to make
some sort of deadline...
That's seems like a pretty realistic analogy to me.
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