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Discussion on: Switching back to my old buddy Sublime Text from VS Code 🤷🏻‍♂️

 
rhymes profile image
rhymes

@moopet I think that's also a general assumption we shoudn't make. I bought my first Macbook with Google Summer of Code's money during uni. I wasn't wealthy, at all :-)

People are also allowed to save for the things they want, we shouldn't judge them.

The point here is that software shouldn't be slow, it's not "hey, who cares, upgrade your computer"

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mikeschinkel profile image
Mike Schinkel

We shouldn't judge people for living their lives how they want to live them — as long as they are ethical and following the law — but when someone works in a profession then by all means we can judge them for their level of professionalism. A professional developer choosing to work on a computer with only 4GB RAM is just unprofessional.

Now I get that different parts of the world computer costs are a larger percentage of income and I empathize, but if a person is a reasonable developer their incomes can be much higher relative to many others in their region, and good professionals should invest in good tools.

Put another way, I hire freelance developers to work on projects for my company. If I found out that someone was switching to Sublime (instead of using PhpStorm) because they only had 4GB of RAM In their computer, I would be unlikely to hire them unless I determined that it was chicken-and-egg problem; e.g. that they would invest in a better computer but first needed the income to get them there. And I have actually hired someone who did exactly that, and now he works on a state-of-the-art computer, because he is a professional.

But a team of developers where many only have 4GB ram? That sounds like a recipe for a disastrous codebase.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I don't think 4GB is unprofessional per se, it depends what you're doing with it.

It's plenty for a lot of work: I've just logged onto my home dev box and checked, and it's got 6GB, is running hugo and gatsby servers and a couple of Vim instances in tmux.

And out of that 6GB? 5 of it is currently unused. You might say that's because it's headless, but it is what I use for personal development :)

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mikeschinkel profile image
Mike Schinkel

You are talking apples and oranges. The discussion was about not being able to use a quality IDE on the desktop because of only 4GB RAM. An SSH target is a different fruit entirely.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

You're right, but the conversation seemed to have moved on to "professional developer" with no further qualification.

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mikeschinkel profile image
Mike Schinkel

For clarity then, I was assuming the original context of the conversation when I commented my opinion that developers sticking with 4GB by choice was unprofessional.