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Comment by jgaa | Hacker News Reader

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jgaa

May be that is a good thing.

The worst possible IDE in any world + the worst possible build system in any world = Android Studio.

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It's funny that I think the opposite: Idea is the best IDE in the world and Gradle is very good build system.

I know very little about Android development, though.

Seriously, IDEA is absolutely fantastic. From it I'm a huge fan of their sibling products as well (GoLand, CLion, etc). I come from a hugely varied history of IDEs, including Visual Studio, NetBeans, Eclipse, and every one of the so-called light ones, and I would pick IDEA in a heartbeat.

People can shit on how Google integrates with it, but the IDE itself is top notch.

You have obviously not tried enough IDEs!

It's been a while since I've done much Android development, but from what I can recall, Android Studio/Gradle seem to be a major improvement over Eclipse/Ant(?).

I've been a fan of PyCharm - AS that much worse?

I dont think AS is the problem. Android SDK + Build System + Emulators are just not good enough.

If it works the first time you are lucky, if it breaks you are on your own.

Anectodally, but most of the breakage around Android build system I see online and with people I mentor is because they don't actually bother to read the first thing about how their build system works.

It's like people would use npm without ever reading how the package.json file is structured... and then complaining how everything is broken because their copy-pasted internet text broke the build.

This is my experience also. People not fluent with Gradle or just don't want to invest the necessary time in learning how it works just cut and paste stuff into it and wonder why it doesn't work anymore.

Perhaps a build system shouldn't need people to invest so much time into learning it. There must be a better way than all those Gradle API's and all that Groovy syntax.

That's a nice sentiment, but you really can't be an engineer in any kind of software development without having an understanding how your software is put together. Especially if you want to do things like builds for different flavors, customize branding or do any kind of changes in the build process.

Some minimal standard of competence and knowledge is required for you to basically function.

I agree. I was talking about the needless complexity of Gradle and Groovy in handling a build, not the inherent complexity of a build itself. Builds can easily be described declaratively, as shown by Make and Ant, and this was a major step forward for the science of build descriptions. Gradle and Groovy, however, provide a procedural description of builds, with the apparent intention of generating technical debt in user IT land, and then selling them consultancy services and courses.

>I dont think AS is the problem. Android SDK + Build System + Emulators are just not good enough

My AS Emulator starts in about 20 seconds from a cold start and in a couple seconds from a saved image state.

>If it works the first time you are lucky, if it breaks you are on your own.

The people that work on the AS Emulator are on the Androidev reddit quite regularly to answer any questions regarding new releases.

Love PyCharm too, AS so far was a nightmare, mostly because of gradle/jvm/whatever breaking down, but AS often does NOT help, where it could.

Also saw regression creep in in more and more other intellij products.

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