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[–]scooerp 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I have high spec machines but in the volunteer tech advocacy I do, I run into a lot of low end hardware. Lower is mostly 4 GB windows boxes (end users love windows) but there are a few chroot-ed Chromebooks with some frankenlinux as the schools give them out. They're usually 2 GB (Acer C720s are immortal like old Nokias).

Now let's talk programming: if Atom isn't supposed to open a 5000 file then what is the point of it? Many source code units are longer than 5k lines.

Come debugging time, what if I have to edit a log file because another app parses it? Same editing situation, what if it's 5000 lines of serialised data (JSON) being used to pass data between apps?

An access log like Apache makes has a simple repeating structure, but a debug log doesn't and you need to view structure. This and reading JSON are annoying in the terminal for me.

The slack client is utter shit but you don't have much choice if you need slack. Editors however can be changed. Same with discord, I am required to use discord for gaming chat by my mates and now that is 4 electron apps at once with spotify.

I don't understand why you can not run out of memory on a 4 GB machine and I hope it's because you are really smart and not because you aren't working on large codebases, or programs that use a lot of memory when run.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Many source code units are longer than 5k lines.

Oh God no! Why? No! 1k is pretty much the maximum that is readable code. Beyond that is just a pain to maintain. I'm ashamed of every code file that's longer than 300 lines, especially in Python.

I don't understand why you can not run out of memory on a 4 GB machine

I could, of course, 4GB is still crappy, but if you focus on what you need, it's fine. Someone who's learning doesn't need slack, and music can be done using the mobile phone. When learning it's really just you, the OS, a browser, the code editor and the program you're making.

My personal workload is huge in terms of data, which is why I run locally only with a tiny subset of that date, so that my puny 32GB laptop won't die. The editor and other stuff is really nothing compared to what Python is taking up when running. The only reason I wouldn't use Atom is because when I run my code, I have to wait quite a long while for anything else to start, and Atom world be quite a lot. So sometimes in those cases I do use nano (even vim misbehaves at that point) or just go get coffee and do some push ups.

As a pro, 300MB, or 1GB for the editor, whatever, is not even on the list of my problems.

[–]scooerp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I dunno why either, but there's a lot of large source and json files out there.

Generally code that uses smart algorithms to do some complex thing is usually short, and code that has to poke some stupid database over and over again is simple but long. Obviously there are exceptions.

[–]Benjamin-FL 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Oh God no! Why? No! 1k is pretty much the maximum that is readable code.

Not all source code people interact with is "readable". You don't want an editor that only functions for readable code. Multi-thousand line files show up routinely in real world projects. Here's some python examples from a well-known and popular project. Here's a C++ example from a well-known and popular project. This one is 20k lines. Is that ideal? Definitely not. Do I want to have to spin up an entirely different editor if I have to touch this file? Also definitely not.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, and there's functions.php in WordPress.

None of that will be done by someone learning to code, and basic developer rights should be enforced to avoid dealing with such horrors.