I've never really understood the spaces vs tabs argument but isn't the tab character just ide-independent i.e. you could have your ide set up to show tabs as 2 and it wouldn't affect anyone else?

but lol **** eclipse. I mean you just do front end JS and node right?

Speaking of node I went to my monthly node meetup this week and the presentation was about debugging. So the dude does his thing and I ask him if he's made node-inspector work with babel and he's like "well.." and finally I ask this group of like 100 people "hey does anyone here debug node with babel with anything other than the console" and I got a bunch of blank stares and one dude says "well webstorm has something in it". yeah not paying a monthly fee for an ide.

I'm old so I've been through a lot of churn regarding coding conventions. What do you want, 2 space tabs? 8 space tabs? Spaces and not tabs? I guess since you want to see more, you want 2 space tabs. How much ****ing indenting do they have?

If there is so much indenting that it gets so you can't see the code, I think that's the problem, not how big the tabs are.

FYP

Eclipse for the java world of things is not really that bad for a free solution of an IDE.
Yet using it for node and javascript front end work seems crazy.

If I didn't have my jetbrains license, I would probably just use a text editor compared to eclipse or if I was on Windows, use Visual Studio Community Edition. I've heard good things about Visual Studio with node.js from Windows devs. A quick google search shows that you can debug in it and Microsoft is funding the development of node.js so they probably are keeping the development with their tool nice.

Yet, I'm sticking with my $149.00 per year license of all jetbrains products because I sort of want there to be an leader like Adobe in the design world but for IDEs.
I think jetbrains is the most likely candidate to get new features that come along over time from anywhere and put them into the IDE with performance staying good on a decent system. The cost is really a drop in the bucket for the constant updates, listening to community and they actually switched to new pricing model as saying we want to receive funding that isn't just geared towards major features but so we can work on performance. Most people that complain about the products, don't use the product for the time required to get what people are paying for it, out of it and some quick google searches will show you how to boost performance of the IDEs by editing settings to give more memory to the IDEs if your system has it or turn off settings if you have a weak system.

Off topic: If people didn't see this already on hacker news, well this looks interesting for future development.
Link - https://www.decosoftware.com/

If you watch the video, the search component tool built into what they offer is probably going to be a hot feature that I'm speculating will eventually be common.
The ability to search from the web seamlessly and include all dependencies when selected has to attract young developers. The functionality seems like an early demo that shares similarity to what xcode was first attempting to do with the drag components onto the canvas with linking them that sort of failed (still used today but wasn't spread to other development environments).
I do wonder when I see features that skip most of what everyone has to just pickup currently. If these new features in IDEs will degrade or enhance future developers just entering the field. If everything comes to be a one package install, that is just search and modify here or there... Well mainstream people could possibly enter the developing scene without learning a lot of fundamentals and make finding good developers even harder if the new features just create sloppy end results.

I guess there are complexity analysis tools for JavaScript code and I am surmising from Russ's and GM's posts that they would rate code with more than 2 indent levels as highly/too complex.

yeah, those tools exist, i've used them for ruby, but there's no need for fancy code metrics or tools to see why nested indentation is bad. i mean, you can literally see it, right there in your editor, like digital vomit.

Is that like a code smell?

I like gg's digital vomit better to describe multiple indents

is it generally accepted that designers are never consistent with their designs? Like we have an entire page dedicated to style guide, basically bootstrap-lite, but every time a designer comes up w/ a button or input box, it looks ever so slightly different. so now there's 6k lines of css

Too much nesting == terrible code, a programming language invariant.

Roger,

No, designers are known to be lazy and "independent" but it really shouldn't be acceptable to be a special snowflake and cause mass disorganization. On a recent deal the client wanted to meet the designer just to make sure he wasn't some crazy hipster who would be hard to work with, so it's definitely a common enough occurance.

This is pretty common in my experience. I normally create mockups using existing styles unless it's completely obvious that something is supposed to be new/different. Most of the time nobody actually cares about the difference.

If anybody has a problem with it you can start a discussion about updating the global styles/style guide or adding the new element to the style guide.

I feel like it's the front end developers job to ensure that CSS is efficient and manageable. Small variations in UI elements across multiple pages of a single site is pretty amateur.

yes, their pictures are merely suggestions of what the final product should look like

i mean in general designers seem much harder to hire and seem to turnover much faster than engineers. i feel like it's a crappy spot to be in, because they're expected to make it "look pretty" and not add overhead. and as far as i know there's 0 collab effort across designers, they all work solo and make it seem like the loneliest job ever

i feel like if the profession didn't exist, net happiness across the board would go up

That feeling when you troubleshoot and fix a small bug in rails' creator Michael Hartl's tutorial code

Wow, you'd think by now his course would be fully ironed out, but I guess he updates it to keep it modern so it changes frequently? I haven't gone through it in years.

But it is crazy at what type of stuff people manage to uncover. When I shipped my first course I went over it myself 3 times from start to finish, triple checked all slides, triple checked all notes for typos, triple checked all comments for typos and even had a beta tester go through everything once on a completely different OS.

Even after all that I still occasionally get people who report issues. There hasn't been many, and most of them have been super minor things but they come up. A lot of it is because people don't follow your instructions exactly and once this happens a few times, it's enough to introduce some weird case that you'd never anticipate in a million years.

If that tells me anything, it's that having an audience is the best possible way to debug things because you're not going to catch everything on your own no matter how rigorous your testing regime is.

80% chance it was a mistake on my part from a line of code I added to fix something else that wasn't working for unrelated reasons.

are you allowed to share your company name? could you recommend another company that also does this stuff well?

We're launching a new site on Friday this week, and I'll give a link if that is cool.

Our current one was designed by someone other than me and is pretty bad.

The best out there is www.hugeinc.com imo, they are my model for this type of thing.

Some people just can't hang in our system design class. Last thursday we had to turn in an assignment that is supposed to be a simple shell. It supports running a program and the redirection operators <,>. Professor had it extended an extra 48 hours and people are still having a meltdown.



Next weeks assignment is going to be even harder with supporting pipes and background processes. So if you wrote a program that didn't have that foresight in mind, you would have to rewrite it again.

Please tell the OP that I never want to work with someone whose writing is as bad as theirs, hopefully they still have a technical communication course somewhere ahead of them

maybe the peevish tone rubs you the wrong way, but aside from some trivial grammatical errors like comma splices, which don't affect the readability imo, the writing is clear and communicates the author's thoughts and feelings.

it's hard to tell if the complaint is valid or the author just isn't cut out for programming, although barrin's posting it makes me think the latter.

Ok indentation Nazis - tell me how this is bad code.

This is just a grunt task. Yeah I can define the rename function somewhere else. But whatever it's small and is easy to just throw in the config. This is pretty standard.

My point is there are massive levels of indentation all over the place. With AMD it seems like sometimes you're 4 indents in before you can even define a function you want to return with module.exports. So using 4 spaces instead of 2 just makes zero sense to me.

How many lines of code is your grunt file though? 400? Should separate into multiple files imo.

Why?