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Comment by thesz | Hacker News Reader

The reliance on the tool in front of you can constrain you.

Some tools are fads, some make you less of a thinking person.

When I faced a second wave of IDEs I figured that any IDE is a fad - there will be better IDE in near future and your boss will require you to use it.

The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand, because you always can investigate, as opposed to internalize/remember. The difference? If you know internal relations, you can judge changes easier. You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person.

The same goes to LMs - they help you not to know/remember and/or create thoughtfully. LMs constrain you to not know fully.

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> The use of IDE can make you know less about project at hand

i disagree.

Someone who's not interested in the project might know less (but is still able to accomplish their task), where as without such an IDE, they will have to learn a lot first. It's one reason why beginner java courses at university asks you not to use an IDE (at least for the first few tutorials learning the basics).

But this isn't the fault of the IDE at all, and simply just reflect the motivations of the person using it.

An IDE makes someone motivated to learn be more capable. It's a multiplier/enabler.

> less of a thinking person.

no, it makes you think less unimportant stuff, and thus have more to dedicate to the important stuff. Effortless navigation in an IDE (like intellij) means you can move through the call graph of an application without having to see/understand the entire application completely.

The same can be said for LLMs - may be not today's, since it's still early, but at some point these LLM tools will make trivial/unimportant things easy, leaving time for you to focus on the things the LLM can't do.

And the written word helps you to not remember anything, to paraphrase Socrates, so better get to memorizing the Odyssey so you can be an even better person.

I got better things to burn my neurons on than memorization. I normally forget almost everything, only remember abstract stuff. Maybe it's because I have used web search for 25 years that I learned to remember the good search keywords rather than actual information. Is this like relying on maps for navigation instead of pure memory?

London taxi drivers that need to remember approximately 35 thousands streets and their more or less recent state, have two changes in their brains: they have a dedicated brain area that helps with navigation and their hippocampus is bigger and more dense than hippocampus of regular people of their age and comparable lifestyle.

Hippocampus is the brain's system to transfer knowledge from short term memory to long term memory.

If you do not have enough physical activity, it shrinks with age.

In other words, London taxi drivers are slightly more young brain-wise than people of their age.

Trying to have your memory fresh and live is good for your health.

Can you give more details regarding what IDE features you have in mind? I agree that java/c# people not knowing how to use the command line is bad (because they only know how to click "build project" etc) but IDE features such as LSP, compiler error messages as you type, intelligent completion, variable renaming, etc I think are essential tools.

I think that LSP is a Language Server Protocol. I do not use that. I can understand its utility but I do not use it.

"Compiler error messages as I type" distract me from, well, typing. I can pause to think and then I get an error message for my still incomplete code. I cannot help but notice that and that interferes with the train of thought.

I have trouble with my keyboard lately (two keys do not produce reliable key press events) and only then I started to use CtrlN in vim to autocomplete.

The need of variable renaming is often related to variables in most mainstream languages having multiple roles due to side effects: on input an array has one meaning, after execution of some function the same array now has different meaning. I prefer not to do so and greatly prefer languages with controlled side effects.

OK. For reference, I was an Emacs user for 20 years, and participated heavily in emacs extension development. I used to think like you early on. But, especially if you use languages with expressive/complex type systems, having the editor be able to inform you about types is very useful. So I understand where you're coming from, but you're probably being too absolutist and are upholding preferences that you should re-examine. For example, it's basically silly to write Rust without using rust-analyzer. I agree that feedback can be a distraction while typing but it should be possible to tune your IDE editor to not display anything until a specified amount of time has passed with no keypresses.

I do not write Rust. My day-to-day job is C++'s application support and, frankly, what Rust offers does not help there.

When I do programming for fun, I prefer to use Haskell into which "Rust" can be embedded to, if I need that. But, the problems I am interested to look deep into do not benefit from borrow checker's checks. Sparse non-negative matrix language modeling is not a thing Rust can help with. ;)

(any continuous problems like ML do not benefit from borrow checker)

And I do not use emacs. I use vim. As an EDITOR for midnight commander. I go to ghci when I need feedback, not earlier. ;)

> You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person

Lost you here. A better person by using old school IDEs? What are you smoking

A better person used LLM and whatever tool he gets at disposal to get job done ASAP and then goes outside to enjoy life with fellow humans

What you do with LLM will affect other persons, especially if the result is code. The cumulative time others spent reading your code will be much longer than you writing it.

You go hang up with your five-ten friends and dozens of other men and women will read your code meanwhile.

LLMs do not help you not to produce smaller code, I see no such goals being pursued.

That's why I make an effort to report anyone whose code I have to read to the police. They are immoral people. All codebases should be a single character.

> You are better programmer that way and I would say a better person.

You think not using IDEs makes you a better person?

IDEs add overhead, thus burn CPU cycles, thus increase your CO2 footprint. Not using IDEs is the only moral choice.

So true. The only moral dev tool is a HEX editor.

Or, for those less capable, also add a C compiler, as any newer language is guaranteed to have either runtime overhead or wasteful compile times.

If an IDE makes you more productive, you can spend the extra time optimizing your code to reduce CO2, so it depends.

The only moral choice is to turn the computer off.

"Real programmers use COPY CON PROGRAM.EXE"

What is a fad to you?

To me a fad is a topic of general interest, time-boxed to a short period, and is something frivolous: pet rock, hula hoop, sneakers with wheels.

I think we have different definitions.

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