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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes, but with single powerful IDE solutions from companies like jetbrains, setting up a "cushy" environment is barely any work.

I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.

> The majority of developers don't even need to do this or don't even know what you're talking about as they only interact with cloud services nowadays.

Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.

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>I promise, installing a Jetbrains product on a traffic controller (which is what I was thinking of re: the field trip) would be a tremendous amount of work.

Jetbrains isn't installed on a traffic controller. It's installed on your local machine. Both VSCode and jetbrains have something called "remote development" which allow you to develop on a remote machine as if it was local. It's similar to ssh and vim.

>Yes, and they're one geomagnetic storm away from being entirely useless. It might not be for everybody, but there's value in being able to work with a lean toolset.

A geomagnetic storm will render everything useless, I don't see how a vim user will be more protected then a vscode user.

Not everything, just things hooked up to long enough wires to induce significant current. Pretty much just the power grid and the copper communication networks. For instance, I've got a raspberry pi hooked up to some solar panels handling some gardening stuff for me, it'll be just fine.

Editors are irrelevant to that conversation, but people who are accustomed to relying on stacks with many dependencies will definitely find that they struggle more without the internet than people who keep their dependencies minimal. And it's not a cherry picked example, there are all kinds of cases where minimal dependencies = resilience. It doesn't mean you have to go around using punch cards or something, it's really just the emotional attachment to complex tooling that I'm calling out as a hazard here. You end up cultivating skills that are easily invalidated.

>For instance, I've got a raspberry pi hooked up to some solar panels handling some gardening stuff for me, it'll be just fine.

You can remote ssh into the pi with Vscode or a jetbrains IDE with a laptop that likely won't be fried either under your description.

Python can run on the rasperry pi. Even high level interfaces will remain. Additionally GUI support exists on a Pi.

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