HLS/Visual Studio Code -- what's so great about it?

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#21

Thanks @santiweight for both parts of your post. I didn’t want to write a grumpy post before bed (although maybe my last post reads that way – it was more bemused than grumpy, but I can’t control how it reads), but I’ll write one in the freshness of morning. :slight_smile:

I just want to chime in with what is said above about questioning the goal of this thread. It doesn’t seem that the goal is to learn about HLS. (Note: “seem” – maybe that is the goal, but it doesn’t seem that way.) A thread to learn about HLS would have questions, acknowledge answers to those questions without attacks, and would have less opinion from the original poster. The goal might be just to have a good time needling other people and engaging in debate. This is sometimes fun, and I’m often up for a good debate – but then I think we’d all appreciate knowing that this is the goal and so we all know the rules of the game (and can choose not to participate). Or maybe the goal is simply to complain. That’s less productive, but sometimes warranted. In this case, again it should be clarified what the goal is. (Example: titling the thread: “I don’t understand HLS and don’t like it” would clarify this direction.) Or maybe the goal is to troll, by asking questions and then cornering people by skewering their answers. That’s just rude and is a great time sink. And yet that’s the most accurate characterization I can find for the thread as it has played out.

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#22

Something I didn’t mention in the not grumpy part of my post is that I really value the struggling part of your videos. I struggled (as many do) with impostor syndrome, or at least felt I was a bad coder - and I really like that your videos show the silly mistakes and misfortunes of coding. As a younger dev it makes me feel a lot better about my abilities and more welcome in the Haskell community to have opinions and discuss. In our Haskell community in particular we have to confront the issue of newbie feeling intimidated by talented mathematical minds (with phds left and right), and your videos make it easier to feel welcomed by that mindset.

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#23

I’ll be brief. I asked the question because I’d seen comments praising HLS but that didn’t explain what it did or how it did it or what (people thought) was so great about it. (Where could I see HLS in action? The only place I could guess was Richard’s videos, but I wasn’t sure at first if that was HLS.)

I thought Discourse would be the venue for that sort of more free-flowing discussion, where there would inevitably be opinions as much as ‘hard facts’. (I wasn’t here to “skewer” answers; it’s reasonable to probe a claim that something ‘saves time’ by asking how much time.)

It’s come down to a matter of preference/taste. Then for my taste, HLS/VS Code looks ugly, cluttered and ungainly. I haven’t gotten enough information from this thread to tell whether HLS makes out-of-the-box VS Code more or less ungainly.

Thank you to people for responding. I won’t be using HLS/VS Code.

#24

“Free-flowing” and “opinions” are no excuse for being disrespectful and confrontational.

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#25

False dichotomy. I posited an alternative way (which I use) to achieve the effect of that single click. It takes nothing like 2 hours.

There’s a celebrated bit of workplace research, in which the workers reported a lift in productivity “with almost any change”. But the lift was illusory or only temporary.

@Bodigrim Would it be disrespectful to those workers to suggest their perceptions were illusory? I guess it would make them grumpy.

I believe that adopters of HLS believe adopting it lifts their productivity. I’ve seen blackscreen mode spread through a coding shop. I’ve heard programmers congratulating themselves on how better a workplace that makes it. I’ve seen a (temporary) drop in productivity as programmers stand around the espresso machine [**] discussing how cool their screens now look. After that temporary drop there was no improvement in productivity.

ok …

[**] Introducing the espresso machine caused a non-temporary drop in productivity – making espresso and cleaning the milk spout takes a lot longer than instant. Until we employed somebody (at much lower pay than a programmer) to clean and tidy. Thereafter productivity returned to usual levels: drinking better-tasting coffee doesn’t make programmers more productive.

#26

False dichotomy is where I give you two (or limited) options that are not the only options. I did not give you any options so it doesn’t apply. I was giving a comparison to your argument that:

“with a click” “saves me … keystrokes” seems to me a gimmick (what’s wrong with a couple of clicks and bit of typing?)"

And pointing out that this type of argument is dismissing the premise of this thread - which is that productivity can be improved. If I had to type each letter twice while typing, it would inhibit my productivity. Limiting keystrokes and clicks is a way to improve productivity… this is just obviously true, and we told you ways in which we felt that gain. You can’t just say “so what, I can still with only a little more typing” - you are dismissing the basic premise that this_thread_was_based_on.

There’s a celebrated bit of workplace research

Some changes to workplaces are arbitrary. We are suggesting these changes are not. How can you judge whether they are not without trying? I could equally tell you that Notepad++ makes things worse, and using Notepad is just as fine because in 1930 it turned out workers did not understand their own productivity. Maybe you are the one who doesn’t understand your own productivity. At the very least I have the industry + people on my side - you have your doubts from a position of never having used an IDE. You could still be right, of course, but the odds are low.

Would it be disrespectful to those workers to suggest their perceptions were illusory?

Yes without any good reason. Your default position is clearly to disbelieve. Watching Richard code for a few hours is barely any evidence. Watching someone do something you’ve never done does not grant you the experience.

I believe that adopters of HLS believe adopting it lifts their productivity.

Great - leave us alone. If you’re the type of person who can’t take others’ experiences as evidence don’t harass us asking for our experiences. The thread is called “what’s so great about it?” There is no indication that we can provide evidence to answer your question. The available evidence has been given - you are unconvinced.

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#27

Employees are not machines.

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#28

Long time emacs user here, and I was happily doing HLS on emacs, until a co-worker demoed VSCode remote containers and remote extensions. That feature alone convinced to me to switch to VSCode as I no longer have to chase the next expensive laptop

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#29

(I know this thread has done it’s dash, but I gotta share this ‘jovial’ remark.

What is an IDE in Programming? “An IDE will allow you to find all the mistakes in your program.”

Ahhhh relief! Why was I previously forbidden from finding mistakes? And all of the mistakes, hooray!

)

#30

You seem to have the belief that things like pausing to add imports yourself keep one thinking and grounded, while interactive or “video game” features make people not think.

Neither will be true for everyone.

As for your import example, it’s much more unwieldy to do while voice coding than HLS adding it for me.

There are advantages to interactive environments, namely for me the fact that small context switches make flow state much harder.

Perhaps you just don’t want to acknowledge the part accessibility and neurons-divergence plays here?