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Code Editor Wars

Geoff Stevens on March 25, 2019

The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Developers TL;DR Microsoft once controlled the greatest, closed source developer platform—Windo...
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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

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Geoff Stevens

How have I never seen this before? That's amazing.

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David S.

I don't like VSCode because it's sort of an underhanded way to nudge developers back into the Microsoft world.

Yes, you can use it without getting suckered into using Microsoft services, but still.. ick!

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Meghan (she/her)

It's made by Microsoft yes, but in no way does it "nudge developers back into the Microsoft world". It's just a good editor.

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David S.

First class support for typescript, azure, .net, and Microsoft Office comes off as a nudging to me.

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zeddotes

Nudging would be adding Clippy.

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her) • Edited

Nudging would be when you're writing something in JavaScript or Elm, to have it pop up a notification that says "Hey, I see you making this cool web app, you should try writing it with TypeScript!"

Oh. So yeah adding Clippy.

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Ronaldo Peres

I use it sometimes,
just discovered that was made with electron!

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David S.

The fact that it's made with electron is pretty cool.

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Aelaf

but you can't open multiple projects at at time like eclipse or intellij :-(

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theelectricdave profile image
David S.

Really? that's kind of sad.

I'm a Intellij fanboy myself. Other editors ( sublime text, vs code, etc ) make me feel like i'm roughing it..

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Michiel Hendriks

And there you have it. Using open source to try to achieve a cloud lock-in. It's the same trick. But this time Microsoft has a huge competitor which has the same goal to lock in users into their services.

Don't build for AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Build for things which can run on either platform.

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David S.

Amen brother.

So many devs and operations dudes falling for the lock in these days. Amazon is really bad about it. I have actively been fighting this and encouraging the use of open source alternatives for every organization i manage the servers for.

At some point, the companies that fell for proprietary implementations are going to find themselves in some really deep shit when Microsoft/Google/Amazon decide to pull the plug on some critical function that they could have just implemented on the server with common linux software..

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Ivan Petrov • Edited

I think you are making a very similar point in your conclusion to one of the main theses in
Joel Spolsky's classic article - Strategy Letter V

"Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements."

The "cyclones" are technically called positive feedback loops by the system dynamics field. You might want to check it out. It gives a lot of meta-insights.

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Aelaf

I loved how you start the article!!! with current dev trends
hope to read more of your articles

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Martin Häusler

Microsoft and open-source is an old topic. Their strategy is always the same: embrace, extend, extinguish. Works every time. Look it up.