The Era of Visual Studio Code [Link to blog post + HN]

Not_Oles

Here's a link to a blog post tracing the recent history of and current developments in editors and IDEs: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2020/09/21/the-era-of-visual-studio-code/

TLDR: The post cites the 2004 release of TextMate as a pivotal year in the history of editors and IDEs, because TextMate introduced the world to features which would become fundamental to all future editors and IDEs: abbreviation based snippets, automatic paired characters, fuzzy finding by file name, scope selectors, theming, and, above all, extensions. The post details the development of these features in Sublime Text (2008), Atom (2014), and Visual Studio Code (2015). The post says that, in VSCode, the progression of the extensions idea now has matured because there is no longer a way to "leapfrog" other editors by improving extensions.

The post mentions the current progression of editors "beyond the confines of the desktop," as shown by the release of code-server and Codespaces, both of which run VSCode as a web app. The post says that VSCode has become a "model" or "something of a standard" for how to write an IDE, pointing to Theia as a "re-implementation" of VSCode.

Last but not least, the post is supported by lovely graphs which accompany discussion of the usage popularity and development releases of Sublime Text and TextMate. And, yes, the post does mention vi, vim, and emacs.

Not_Oles

I found this blog post when the author put it up on Hacker News where it received as of this writing 646 comments, including from the project leader of Codespaces.

To me it seems an achievement to post to HN and get 646 comments like that. Morover, the post struck a chord in me because I often ask folks what they use as their development environment. A few years ago I was hanging out in San Francisco, and it impressed me that none of the younger coders had even the slightest interest in anything other than Sublime Text. I swear, the old "vi or emacs?" joke no longer had the slightest utility as a conversation starter!

Now, my impression is the same, but substitute VSCode for Sublime text.

Constantly I am on the lookout for how srvr.ovh could be improved. I wonder, what do customers want to do with their VPS? So far, common answers seem to include a remote coding station, a vpn, and some kind of file sharing app. So I am studying up a bit on VSCode through code-server.

If I had to criticize the wonderful blog post, I might wonder whether the editor/IDE usages vary depending on the development language. Possibly those working with C, for example, might be more inclined toward vim, neovim, and emacs, whereas the newer editors might be more popular with those working in javascript, html, and css.

As a huge fan of "the standard text editor," I regret to report being unable to find it mentioned anywhere in the post! Nor does there seem to be any mention of nano, which recently released version 5. Yeah, there might be a new release of org mode too. I've never tried it. I should!

Not_Oles

Maybe this type of "content aggregation" is inappropriate for LES. As I said, for me, the post was interesting because I am wondering about how editor/IDE trends might affect the VPS business. If this post isn't useful, please let me know.

Greetings from Mexico! Wishing you a great day!

elliotc

For Java, IntelliJ is the way to go. light weight editor still cant replace the fat IDE.

alwyzon

Thanks for sharing, Tom. The transition to "coding in the cloud" for sure is a thing, it probably just doesn't start as one would expect as 1-to-1 replacement for full-blown IDEs yet. Though, with the iPad and other tablets becoming more and more a replacement for desktop systems, I wouldn't be surprised to see more coding to be done through a web browser on any kind of thin-client like system such as a tablet.

For example, in the data science community an open-source tool called Jupyter has become pretty much a de-facto standard already. And, JetBrains is also working on a competitor to integrate the features of their deskop-IDE PyCharm into a similar commercial tool called DataLore. Both these tools may be considered data science oriented browser-based IDEs.

But, I only see very little impact on the low-end VPS industry for these kinds of tools yet: Google offers a free service called Google Colab, a hosted Jupyter instance powered by a GPU-backed cloud server. As long as those tools are offered to be hosted for free by somebody, I don't see any reason why one would install Jupyter on their own VPS. It's pretty much the same as with Git repositories; barely anyone will consider setting up their own Gitlab servers when they can host their repos for free on GitHub.

havoc

Yup. Feels like too much power in MS hands (again)...but it's hard to deny that it's a great product.

Esp the SSH remote integration and the way it has extensions for everything under the sun

Not_Oles

New HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565606

Not_Oles

@alwyzon said: Google offers a free service called Google Colab, a hosted Jupyter instance powered by a GPU-backed cloud server.

I didn't know about this. I have to go look it up. Thanks for the tip!

Iroshan464

Colab is awesome.
Can mount google drive.
Can use almost as a disposable vps for smaller tasks. Like transferring data, testing projects.
Even downloading a torrent once in a while.

Not_Oles

I launched it . . . I mean I went to the website . . . and it was . . . just so instantly there right in front of me, on my screen ready to go. No need to create an account or login or launch anything. Or so it seemed.

Iroshan464

Wanna have some fun?
Try this.
https://colab.research.google.com/github/biplobsd/OneClickRun/blob/master/OneClickRun.ipynb

Not_Oles

@Iroshan464 said:
Wanna have some fun?
Try this.
https://colab.research.google.com/github/biplobsd/OneClickRun/blob/master/OneClickRun.ipynb

Wow! Just wow!

Lots of discussion around privacy issues, lock in to the platform, getting data out. But, zero trouble installing. Zero trouble maintaining. It just works. Also, everybody else is there, so if not there, harder to or even impossible to collaborate. Plus, if not there, one maybe seems weird. Just saying. Wanna rent a VPS and install our own self-hosted Jupyter Notebooks? How will our uptime and our last mile compare to Google?

Glad you are having fun!

seanho

Thanks Tom, I love chatting about editors; I think the UX of software dev is so important! All those little quality-of-life improvements help smooth over the tedious busywork and reduce interruptions to the flow of thought.

I was pretty heavily into emacs way back in the day, did some elisp hacking, then somewhere around the time of Mandrake Linux switched over to vim, and haven't looked back. There are still so many shortcuts I have yet to learn; I just use normal file motion shortcuts, search/replace, fugitive, etc.

Oh, I had a brief fling with Eclipse, too, but it was way too heavy and crashy for regular use.

In R, RStudio is the de-facto standard, and is what I use (with vim keyboard bindings!).

The open-source core of VSCode is MIT licensed, and MS has been pretty open-minded about their plans for it.