The Ideal Software Development Environment
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I was talking to a friend about how I hate software development and what would make me happy as a software developer, and I came up with this definition:
A project where the only problems I have to deal with are those I caused myself. Not problems due to buggy tools, not problems due to co-workers writing bad code.
Ideal. Ideal. Ideal. Ideal. Ideal.
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@blakeyrat sounds like a nice utopia, but how do we get there from here? Shitty environments and shitty tools seem par for the course these days.
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@polygeekery I think the people problem is probably the less-solvable of the two.
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@magus I see the distribution problem as the worst. We're not "allowed" to just create desktop apps anymore, so to get your app out there you need to deal with AppStore bullshit or browser UI bullshit.
Tools are getting worse, yes, but, say, WinForms is just as good now as it ever was. The problem is nobody's interested in making an app in WinForms, because how do you put it on the webs or on your stupid cellphone?
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
I was talking to a friend about how I hate software development and what would make me happy as a software developer, and I came up with this definition:
A project where the only problems I have to deal with are those I caused myself. Not problems due to buggy tools, not problems due to co-workers writing bad code.
Build a processor, and write an operating system for it.
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@blakeyrat I actually think the UWP platform is pretty good now though, and getting better. It's also more slimmed down than WPF, and to the best of my knowledge, the designer actually works for it. So maybe it's not all getting worse.
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@polygeekery What do you mean 'these days'? I don't recall ever running across many non-shitty tools before...
My first shitty tool was the BASIC interpreter on a Pr1me mini. It was, not surprisingly, also my first programming tool, period.
File Under: And it was still better than ShillFarce Nadir.
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Is Gradle a shitty tool? I haven't run into any real problems with it IIRC.
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@scholrlea said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
What do you mean 'these days'? I don't recall ever running across many non-shitty tools before...
Visual Studio 2017 is a shittier tool than Visual Studio 2010.
If I didn't need TypeScript intellisense, I'd downgrade.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@scholrlea said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
What do you mean 'these days'? I don't recall ever running across many non-shitty tools before...
Visual Studio 2017 is a shittier tool than Visual Studio 2010.
If I didn't need TypeScript intellisense, I'd downgrade.
See, now I'm curious what you're talking about. How's it a shittier tool?
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@pie_flavor I had to force-quit it about 6 times today.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@pie_flavor I had to force-quit it about 6 times today.
Well, I've never experienced anything like that.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Visual Studio 2017 is a shittier tool than Visual Studio 2010.
If I didn't need TypeScript intellisense, I'd downgrade.
Can’t you get that in 2015?
(I agree that 2017 is a lousy piece of crap, although my set of bugs is different from yours, but 2010/2013/2015 are roughly comparable in my experience. The only thing keeping me on 2017 is live unit testing and me wanting to switch to .NET Standard - but I’m rapidly thinking it’s not worth it.)
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@unperverted-vixen What sort of problems are you having? Since update 3, it's seemed more stable so far than update 2 was, which seems to be a trend.
I'm hoping that the new project my team was assigned, where the architecture astronauts were given less time to destroy everything with than the last nightmare project, will be amenable to Live Unit Tests. As it uses Service Fabric, and integrates with a system said architecture astronauts designed after reading a book on Domain Driven Design extensively (To the point where they prefer terminology from their architectural jargon books over the things the code does, and have built the Kingdom of Nouns), I'm rather worried.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
not problems due to co-workers writing bad code
That sort of thing is one of the reasons why people who are actually good should be paid well: fixing other people's shit so that it doesn't Make Baby Jesus Cry.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
I was talking to a friend about how I hate software development and what would make me happy as a software developer, and I came up with this definition:
A project where the only problems I have to deal with are those I caused myself. Not problems due to buggy tools, not problems due to co-workers writing bad code.
Has that ever been true for any aspect of life for anyone?
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@thecpuwizard said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Has that ever been true for any aspect of life for anyone?
PLEASE LOOK UP THE WORD "IDEAL" IN A DICTIONARY BEFORE REPLYING.
How is it possible so many people don't know what the word "ideal" means? This really vexes me.
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@magus said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@unperverted-vixen What sort of problems are you having? Since update 3, it's seemed more stable so far than update 2 was, which seems to be a trend.
Update 3 is less bad, but I still think VS2015 is more stable than VS2017 in its current state.
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Each new VS update makes it forget all the extensions I had installed/enabled.
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Upgrading extensions consistently corrupts some sort of VS cache or setting file, to the point where I have to go delete some file in AppData, then reenable all of my extensions, before they start working again. (Doesn't seem to matter which extension.)
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At least previously the CodeLens process (Microsoft.Alm.Shared.Remoting.RemoteContainer.dll) seemed to have a memory leak; it would routinely start eating RAM until it was using a GB of its own (in addition to the 750 MB for VS itself). It seems like Update 3 may have fixed this - I'm not seeing any sign of that process anymore. Although VS itself is how using about 50% more than it used to, it's still a net gain I think.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@pie_flavor I had to force-quit it about 6 times today.
I've been working with 2015 and have to do the same. grumblegrumble
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
How is it possible so many people don't know what the word "ideal" means? This really vexes me.
Oh, the ideal involves not using Javascript, Ruby, Python, or Java. (It might involve other things too, but the above are a good start.)
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@thecpuwizard said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Has that ever been true for any aspect of life for anyone?
PLEASE LOOK UP THE WORD "IDEAL" IN A DICTIONARY BEFORE REPLYING.
How is it possible so many people don't know what the word "ideal" means? This really vexes me.
While you did include "Ideal" in the thread title, it was not in the post itself, I was responding to the post. Look at many (most ?) of the other replies that are not specific to the title of a thread.....
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@dkf said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Oh, the ideal involves not using Javascript, Ruby, Python, or Java. (It might involve other things too, but the above are a good start.)
I would say (given Blakely's last post) that "ideal" includes not using any existing software (or hardware)....
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@scholrlea said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
What do you mean 'these days'? I don't recall ever running across many non-shitty tools before...
Visual Studio 2017 is a shittier tool than Visual Studio 2010.
If I didn't need TypeScript intellisense, I'd downgrade.
OK, this is a fair point. In keeping with what you said later, I think we can agree that ideally, new versions/upgrades of tools would improve them rather than making them worse.
I also think that while 'better' and 'worse' are subjective, just about everyone who uses a program would agree that going from 'stable in regular use' to 'crashing frequently in regular use' is a Bad Thing in a release-stage program.
And conversely, that you would not be using - or be asked to use - pre-release versions of development tools.
Which - correct me if I am wrong - is part of your beef with the FOSS development model (or rather, the particular variant of 'Agile' adopted by most FOSS projects): there really is no separation between 'testing' and 'release', even in things that get called 'release version', because there is no formal testing except maybe some unit test scripts, no acceptance testing, no user feedback mechanism except the bug tracker (if there is one, fuck you @wood), and no real effort made to actually make the programs palatable beyond saying, "if you don't like it, fix it yourself or GTFO".
I get it, and I even agree to a large extent, I just don't see commercial software doing any better. They fuck up in different ways, but either way it is still far from Ideal.
I don't think that the whole problem, but I am, I think, finally starting to understand your view on it. The problem is that while you have said a lot about how much you think FOSS sucks, and given different reasons in different contexts, you really haven't sat down and explained it all in on place despite having been asked to do so.
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@thecpuwizard said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
While you did include "Ideal" in the thread title, it was not in the post itself, I was responding to the post.
I fucking fixed it, you illiterate.
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Damn it, I did it again. You might want to look at the edited version of my last post (or not, I don't know).
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@scholrlea said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
I don't think that the whole problem, but I am, I think, finally starting to understand your view on it. The problem is that while you have said a lot about how much you think FOSS sucks, and given different reasons in different contexts, you really haven't sat down and explained it all in on place despite having been asked to do so.
Yeah, first of all I don't owe that to you. Secondly, as far as I'm aware, this is the first time anybody ever asked me to sit down and write it all out.
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@blakeyrat OK, fair enough, I just think you might want to because it would give you something you could point to and say, "yeah, that's what I mean" in the future. Your call, though.
However, I did ask before. I even made a thread some time back specifically asking you to. But as you say, you have no obligation to do that.
EDIT: I found the thread in question, here. You refused to answer - and understandably so - because I was a dick when I came up with the title of the thread. Point to you, I shouldn't have been a dick and I can't blame you for blowing me off.
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@dkf said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Python, or Java
Hey now
The only real issues I see with using Java now that we have streams and functional interfaces are:
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Fuck Oracle
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You have to depend on the JRE which constantly requires security patches
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Fuck using it for Desktop apps.
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@dkf said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
How is it possible so many people don't know what the word "ideal" means? This really vexes me.
Oh, the ideal involves not using Javascript, Ruby, Python, or Java. (It might involve other things too, but the above are a good start.)
The ideal is not using a technology to create and display documents to build an interactive app.
You know, go back to the normal way of doing things where everything is fixed and you have to tell a space to scroll and everything you put in that space is relative to the scroll offset, rather than today where we have to explicit the reverse.
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@xaade said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
The ideal is not using a technology to create and display documents to build an interactive app.
Just as clarification, I assume you meant 'a technology intended for creating (static) documents, and rendering them for display'. is that a fair interpretation?
If so, I agree. Trying to shoehorn active, interactive applications into a rendering engine designed for HTML (or Display PostScript, or any of the other similar formats that have now gone by the wayside) seems rather less than ideal.
Trying to do interactive applications where half of it is done on one machine and the other half on another, without any clear rhyme or reason as to which parts are done where and forcing both sides to communicated via narrow, asymmetric channels is also a Bad Idea, and was one of the flaws in X Window System back when people remembered that the whole point of X was managing remote graphics (which it still did better than HTTP, because HTTP wasn't designed for interactive application use).
Doing both at the same time? Recipe for disaster. Or Node.JS, but I repeat myself.
File Under: Reinventing a broken wheel, one misbegotten
glorified libraryframework at a time.
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@unperverted-vixen said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Upgrading extensions consistently corrupts some sort of VS cache or setting file, to the point where I have to go delete some file in AppData, then reenable all of my extensions, before they start working again. (Doesn't seem to matter which extension.)
The extensions I use: Viasfora, Productivity Power Tools, Trailing Whitespace Visualizer, Multi Edit Mode, Always Aligned, File Nesting, Hide Main Menu, Slowcheetah, and all the random other things added by visual studio and those extensions. So I have a lot of them on. And yet the thing never crashes, doesn't deteriorate when I update, and doesn't seem to leak memory.
Admittedly, all the machines I work on are running Windows 10, but I'm finding more and more that things tend to work.
Now, some of my coworkers have had MSBuild freak out lately when encountering a new service fabric project, but so far that's about it.
I'm honestly really curious as to what would be causing such major issues.
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My ideal development environment would be the one Richard Pryor uses in Superman 3.
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@magus said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
The extensions I use: Viasfora, Productivity Power Tools, Trailing Whitespace Visualizer, Multi Edit Mode, Always Aligned, File Nesting, Hide Main Menu, Slowcheetah, and all the random other things added by visual studio and those extensions. So I have a lot of them on. And yet the thing never crashes, doesn't deteriorate when I update, and doesn't seem to leak memory.
Well, I envy you. :) I'm using Productivity Power Tools (and some of its subextensions), SonarLint, and the ones that ship with VS. And I had trouble before I installed SonarLint so I don't think it's to blame.
I'm honestly really curious as to what would be causing such major issues.
Me too. Admittedly, we're still on Windows 7 ( IT), so that may be part of the problem.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
A project where the only problems I have to deal with are those I caused myself. Not problems due to buggy tools, not problems due to co-workers writing bad code.
But then there'd be no-one left to blame when things are still shitty.
I do have part of your 'ideal' - I'm the sole developer in my organisation. The code-base I work on is entirely mine, warts and all.
That's anything but ideal.
I would love to have co-workers (interns or whatever) to do parts of the work. They'd inevitably introduce a load of new bugs and not do things the 'right way', but that would still be better than working in isolation. As it is there is almost never time to get anything properly finished or tested to my satisfaction; there's no-one to review any code or to complain when some of my solutions get too arcane or burrowed down a rabbit hole.
Bad code written by imperfect co-workers is irritating, but having no-one else to turn to at all is probably worse.
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@magus Do you use TypeScript intellisense? That's my suspicion.
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@japonicus said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Bad code written by imperfect co-workers is irritating, but having no-one else to turn to at all is probably worse.
I’m similarly alone right now. But given some of my coworkers’ “quality”, I’d rather be alone than have some of them causing me more work.
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@blakeyrat I haven't much. What little I did wasn't very good, but didn't seem to cause any major issues for anyone on my team. Though actually, now that I think of it, one guy's intellisense was broken one time...
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@scholrlea said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Just as clarification, I assume you meant 'a technology intended for creating (static) documents, and rendering them for display'. is that a fair interpretation?
Oh, Web apps. You're a much better @xaade-interpreter than I am; I had no idea what he was on about.
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@greybeard said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
My ideal development environment would be the one Richard Pryor uses in Superman 3.
I could go for a Westworld style thing where I just talked to naked robots all day.
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@boomzilla Naked like the robo-whores at the beginning who have human-ish skin, or naked as in you can see all the gizmos and wires like Yul Brynner near the end?
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@blakeyrat For variety's sake, both.
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@boomzilla I don't think people paid enough attention to the fact that that movie was full of robo-whores.
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@blakeyrat I think everyone who watched the HBO show was pretty clear on that point.
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There's a movie?
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Westworld (1973) Trailer – 02:58
— RetroBiografenIt's pretty amazing.
There's a sequel, too, Futureworld.
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@blakeyrat said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Westworld (1973) Trailer – 02:58
— RetroBiografenIt's pretty amazing.
There's a sequel, too, Futureworld.
Is it better than the show? Cause I've seen the show.
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@pie_flavor I don't fucking know, I don't watch TV. I watch cinema, like a dignified person.
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@boomzilla said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
@blakeyrat For variety's sake, both.
Ex-Machina
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@unperverted-vixen said in The Ideal Software Development Environment:
Upgrading extensions consistently corrupts some sort of VS cache or setting file, to the point where I have to go delete some file in AppData, then reenable all of my extensions, before they start working again. (Doesn't seem to matter which extension.)
Oh is that what causes that?
... Actually, nevermind, there thing I have to go delete on occasion is in the registry.
And I think it might be for SSMS.
But yeah, 2017 is slightly crashier in my workflow, too. Which involves 3-4 copies of it open at all times with different solutions.