VSCode is here to stay. After eight years it is by far the most popular programming editor and only becoming more so. The sun was already setting on Sublime and Atom by this long after their initial release.
I agree that sublime is a fad and maybe atom. Sublime’s biggest mistake imho way their proprietary model combined with a plugin system, it’d probably be better to either make it free or make it very ease to use. I don’t see eclipse or VSCode as fads though. To my knowledge eclipse is the only way to develop Java code on Linux platforms without paying for richer tools (let’s face it, eMacs or vim doesn’t have much support for Java). Also Microsoft seems very invested in VSCode
VSCode is not a fad - it has huge support from Microsoft, is the most popular code editor by far, and is a very good tool that's beginner friendly and allows for customisation. It is already almost a decade old. Visual Studio has been around since 1997 so there's a good chance VSCode will be around for a good few years too.
Eclipse and Sublime do still exist and receive improvements. And VS Code is at the moment far too big to fade away in the next years, maybe even decade.
I used Emacs for all development work from about 1990 to 2018. About 28 years of development work in a dozen different programming languages. I also used Emacs for reading Usenet News and my email. I also used it for calendaring, planning, tracking work and a few other things.
Gnus made Emacs a great Usenet news reader, but I could never get it to fit with my email regimen. And eventually Usenet died too. For about a decade I used a mail client that someone else originally wrote, but which I modified over the years to do email like I wanted to. But this became really tedious to maintain alone so I have up.
Along the way I tried various IDEs like the tools from IntelliJ and Eclipse. None of them took. In fact, I figured it had to be me, so I promised myself to spend a few months every 2-3 years or so trying to get used to IDEs. (I still can't stand the IntelliJ and Eclipse tools).
I think what made me switch to VSC was that I eventually grew tired of the constant annoyance of having to fix my setup so it would be reasonably useful for Go development. Emacs support for the Go language server was slow and shaky, and eventually I got so tired of having to make a patchwork of Emacs packages work that I gave Visual Studio Code a second chance.
And the second time around it stuck. I'm not entirely sure why it stuck, but it did. It's been 5 years and I'm still using it. And I'm still not entirely sure why. I think it is mostly that I'm a programmer - not an editor enthusiast. Emacs was a pain in the neck to keep running when I switched. I liked Emacs, but VSC has better support for just about any language you care to program in.
I ditched Emacs because I'm interested in writing code. I'm not interested in spending a day figuring out how to keep barely working Go support running so I can get work done. It's a tool. And when maintaining the tool starts eating into my productivity, it isn't worth the effort.
The problem with Emacs is that it doesn't have a sufficiently large community. Which in turn means that if you are interested in creating tooling, your efforts will have a much bigger payoff if you choose something millions of other developers use. This is a vicious cycle.
Last I checked, VSC had about 14 million users. Out of a global population of 25'ish million developers. That's slightly over half the global developer population. That's a pretty big market. I think a fair guess (given the stack overflow surveys) is that less than a million people use Emacs as their primary development environment. Which I find surprisingly high, but it should give people hope.
Is VSC a fad? Who gives a crap? What matters is that, for me, and for a lot of other people, it is a better tool than Emacs. Because it is. If VSC is replaced by something else that works even better, and VSC disappears: who cares. Better tools is a good thing. Getting overly attached to tools that offer less is just weird and unproductive.
There will always be an editor which is an order of magnitude more popular than emacs or vim, because it is an order of magnitude better. It doesn’t much matter which one it is. People will switch to it, and be productive. And when something better comes along, they will move to that.
weebull|2 years ago
pk2200|2 years ago
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popular-t...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/TIMESERIES/16907280...
bitwize|2 years ago
Aurelius108|2 years ago
EddieJLSH|2 years ago
PurpleRamen|2 years ago
bborud|2 years ago
Gnus made Emacs a great Usenet news reader, but I could never get it to fit with my email regimen. And eventually Usenet died too. For about a decade I used a mail client that someone else originally wrote, but which I modified over the years to do email like I wanted to. But this became really tedious to maintain alone so I have up.
Along the way I tried various IDEs like the tools from IntelliJ and Eclipse. None of them took. In fact, I figured it had to be me, so I promised myself to spend a few months every 2-3 years or so trying to get used to IDEs. (I still can't stand the IntelliJ and Eclipse tools).
I think what made me switch to VSC was that I eventually grew tired of the constant annoyance of having to fix my setup so it would be reasonably useful for Go development. Emacs support for the Go language server was slow and shaky, and eventually I got so tired of having to make a patchwork of Emacs packages work that I gave Visual Studio Code a second chance.
And the second time around it stuck. I'm not entirely sure why it stuck, but it did. It's been 5 years and I'm still using it. And I'm still not entirely sure why. I think it is mostly that I'm a programmer - not an editor enthusiast. Emacs was a pain in the neck to keep running when I switched. I liked Emacs, but VSC has better support for just about any language you care to program in.
I ditched Emacs because I'm interested in writing code. I'm not interested in spending a day figuring out how to keep barely working Go support running so I can get work done. It's a tool. And when maintaining the tool starts eating into my productivity, it isn't worth the effort.
The problem with Emacs is that it doesn't have a sufficiently large community. Which in turn means that if you are interested in creating tooling, your efforts will have a much bigger payoff if you choose something millions of other developers use. This is a vicious cycle.
Last I checked, VSC had about 14 million users. Out of a global population of 25'ish million developers. That's slightly over half the global developer population. That's a pretty big market. I think a fair guess (given the stack overflow surveys) is that less than a million people use Emacs as their primary development environment. Which I find surprisingly high, but it should give people hope.
Is VSC a fad? Who gives a crap? What matters is that, for me, and for a lot of other people, it is a better tool than Emacs. Because it is. If VSC is replaced by something else that works even better, and VSC disappears: who cares. Better tools is a good thing. Getting overly attached to tools that offer less is just weird and unproductive.
agumonkey|2 years ago
there's also the devcontainer and vscode server thing which make vscode a sophisticated commodity
i don't use it, but i've seen the previous eras, the eclipse haydays .. and vscode doesn't feel the same
7e|2 years ago
sph|2 years ago
But yes, compared to Emacs , Code is a passing fad, and I doubt it'll be around in 15 years, let alone in 38
_emacsomancer_|2 years ago
gjvc|2 years ago