Visual Studio Code

[Spectere]

This has been out for a while now, but I'm sure it'll be of interest to at least somebody here (*cough* Bobbias *cough*).

Microsoft released a free, multiplatform editor called Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/. It sort of reminds me in a lot of ways of a stripped down version of Visual Studio with a liberal dash of Sublime Text thrown in for good measure.

It's still pretty early in development with some notable features missing (such as extension support), but it's off to a very nice start! It features things like Git integration, syntax highlighting, autocomplete (in some languages), and debugging (in some languages). The fact that it native supports split panels is quite nice, too (though it only supports adding columns, not rows, oddly enough).

If I had to pick one complaint about the default installation, it's the default font. It's too large by default and when you shrink it down it gets too condensed. The first thing I did was throw this into my user preferences:

Code: [Select]

"editor.fontFamily": "Lucida Console",
"editor.fontSize": 11
I still work with too much classic ASP code (which Code doesn't support but Sublime Text does) to justify switching right now, but I am definitely going to be watching this thing evolve. Should be a fun ride!

Oh, one more interesting thing about Code: it's a node.js application! Every since Nadella stepped up, Microsoft's been surprising me more and more every month. I doubt they would have released something like this in the Gates/Ballmer era (since those days seemed to be all about dogfooding).

[Bobbias]

Heard about it through/r/programming when it was announced. Cool idea, but I dont really deal with web stuff, and already have sublime installed, so it wasn't to appealing for me. I mean, I've dabbled in Vim/Emacs/Sublime/Atom/Brackets/Notepad++/god knows what else, and I just find myself using notepad++ for simple things and sublime for longer stuff. For source code I use full blown VS unless it's a language not supported by VS, in which case I use sublime.

[Spectere]

Yeah, kinda figured you would have heard about it but better safe than sorry.

It doesn't have enough features and such to unseat Sublime Text for my professional development, though I certainly am keeping my eye on it. Like I said, I'm one of the poor bastards who has to maintain a classic ASP site (it's not completely awful, admittedly...its syntax and naming is way more consistent than PHP if nothing else) and Sublime (mostly) supports syntax highlighting for that while VS Code doesn't support it at all. I'll probably wind up switching to VS2013/2015 when we start moving on to ASP.NET.

I've been considering starting up a few simple HTML/JavaScript projects to learn a few new libraries and technologies, so I'll probably use Code for those to give it a good workout.

[Bobbias]

(it's not completely awful, admittedly...its syntax and naming is way more consistent than PHP if nothing else)

That doesn't strike me as particularly difficult to accomplish. I actually have absolutely no experience with ASP though.

I honestly haven't kept up with my coding over the years though. Now I just very occasionally dabble in something whenever the desire is strong enough to motivate me to actually do something. I've tried learning a few different lisps and some haskell over the last few years, but never really wrote anything of consequence.

[Spectere]

ASP is--quite literally--VBScript on a web server. It's certainly functional, though it does tend to be very difficult to do code profiling, and debugging is a bit more of a chore than it is with, say, ASP.NET.

As far as personal coding goes, I've pretty much stuck with C# for big projects and C for when I want to do more ridiculous stuff (either abusing the hell out of the language or doing n00b-level systems programming). I've find myself intrigued by functional programming languages but I haven't really had the inclination to dive into them at this point.

[Bobbias]

The only thing I actually tried building with a lisp was a bit of code to scrape a webpage for a specific link using Racket. I never quite got it working fully, but I was amazed at how few lines it took to accomplish what I did.

Still haven't figured out how to think properly in functional languages though. I find myself just trying to replicate procedural/oop style in them :/

[Spectere]

Yeah, that's pretty much my major sticking point as well. I certainly have interest in them (and have dabbled with some of the handy functional additions in C#) but I haven't really gotten to sit down and get to know them yet.

One of these days!