• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • Have a go on your free time and see if you like it. There is an absolute ton of free learning material online. You don’t need to pay anyone.

    Most programming jobs (e.g. making web sites) are easy enough for the average person to do, but I think most people would find programming far too tedious and boring to learn.

    It’s like law - there’s nothing particularly difficult about it but most people find it incredibly mind numbing to read legal documents.

    So I would have a go in your free time first to make sure it is something you could do.






  • They didn’t have that originally

    They added it within 4 months of launch.

    they added it because of people like you that are arguing that it’s an IDE when it clearly isn’t.

    They added text saying it is an IDE because they didn’t want people to think it is an IDE? I think you’ve misunderstood.

    It’s a text editor with code highlighting, fast search, and an understanding of different languages…

    And integrated debugging, testing, refactoring, … Why exactly do you think it is not an IDE?



  • MS even clarified that it’s not an IDE

    Microsoft doesn’t get to define what an IDE is. Also… I actually reread what they said and the implicitly say it is an IDE (and a “code editor” which is a fairly meaningless term):

    Visual Studio Code is a streamlined code editor with support for development operations like debugging, task running, and version control. It aims to provide just the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle and leaves more complex workflows to fuller featured IDEs, such as Visual Studio IDE.

    “to fuller featured IDEs”, not “to IDEs”.


  • In that case I would recommend using an IDE that supports C well. On Windows Visual Studio will get you far and it is the easiest to set up with wizards to create projects etc.

    Alternatively you could use VSCode but it’s a bit harder to set up.

    1. Install VSCode
    2. Install the clangd extension from the marketplace. It’s better than the official Microsoft C++ one.
    3. Also install the CMake extension.
    4. Create a CMake project by hand (you need CMakelists.txt and main.c). In the CMake make sure you add
    set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS TRUE)
    

    That will give you perfect code intelligence (error squiggles etc).



  • There isn’t a hard line. IDE means Integrated Development Environment. It just means that tools that - in the stone ages - were used separately are integrated into your editor. Common tools that IDEs integrate that would be separate tools with a text editor like Notepad:

    • Debuggers
    • Code intelligence (auto-complete, refactoring, go-to-definition, find-references, etc.)
    • Compile/run/debug shortcuts
    • Test running and displaying results
    • Version control

    VSCode has all of those. The fact that it implements them in a pluggable way doesn’t mean it doesn’t.

    Even though “is it an IDE” is a blurry line, VSCode is very clearly far across that line.

    The only reasons people say it isn’t are a) as a put-down - it’s not a real IDE like <my favourite alternative> - or b) because Microsoft put some nonsense about it not being an IDE on their website in order to try and explain why they make two IDEs (VSCode and VS).