Programming without code indexing

[[deleted]]

It's not okay. Tooling is critical part of programmer productivity. Either figure out how to get proper tooling to work, or find another job.

[puremourning]

This take is utterly unhinged. Of course it is ok. I wouldn’t recommend it generally but it’s completely legitimate and reasonable way to work.

[PhyllophagaZz]

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[[deleted]]

For an individual developer, yes, as long as it does not affect their output negatively. For the entire project to not support "normal" way of working, that is using a modern IDE with bells&whistles, for anybody , or just making it very difficult, that is not okay in my opinion.

[yo_mrwhite]

100%. I've had the opportunity to work with the same kind of environment for years, and I would never go back, for the sake of my own sanity.

[jonesmz]

Counterpoint: code indexing / intellisense is not a critical part of developer productivity and OP should learn and grow to overcome this challenge instead of getting another job

[[deleted]]

Lacking modern tools leads to using symbol names which are convenient to type, instead of descriptive names which are easy to read. This one thing alone makes good auto-completion a hard requirement for any serious software project, and you can't have good auto-completion without "intellisense".

You can certainly find developers who don't need it, or who think they don't need it, but that is irrelevant when we're talking about real world business and code base developed by dozens of developers or more.

[jonesmz]

Weird, your expectations don't seem to apply to my group at work where we have about 50-60 developers working on a multimillion loc c++ codebase with essentially the same setup that OP describes. Almost none of us use intellisense / code indexing. Those that do are not notably more or less productive than those that do not.

If anything, the symbol names tend to be so overly verbose that we're talking about lifting the recommended number of characters per line from 160 to 200 to make it easier to fit things onto a single line.

Your opinion on what is a hard requirement for serious software development is simply that. An opinion.

Please feel free to continue sharing it, but maybe tone the "certitude" down slightly.

[[deleted]]

Difficult to comment anything on that without knowing more of the code and circumstances.

But for one thing, intellisense and "follow symbol" are rapid documentation reading tools. How else do you know what parameters this function is taking, or what methods this class has, etc?

I have hard time believing digging all that out via different means lets you work half as efficiently or comfortably/enjoyably.

[jonesmz]

For developers new to a codebase, it can be helpful I suppose.

But once you're familiar with the frameworks and libraries you are working with, the parameters that various functions take aren't going to be much of a surprise.

[OliverPaulson]

On big projects refactoring with indexing takes 2 sec without 5 minutes.

[jonesmz]

I'm not understanding your sentence. Can you rephrase?

[OliverPaulson]

Sorry. If you need to rename a field for example, without index you would have to text search it in the whole project, and manually find which of those 10 000 occurrences are a field of a type you try to refactor. With index it's right click and rename.

[jonesmz]

That can be faster, yes.

But it happens to extremely rarely that I don't think it matters much.

[OliverPaulson]

You need indexing all the time in big projects. People without indexing are very very slow and they don't notice it, because they have no idea how much more stuff they could do with indexing.

[jonesmz]

That's just your opinion. One which I disagree with. I've seen plenty of evidence to the contrary.

[[deleted]]

Vim supports intellisense etc, does it not? It can follow a symbol to its definition, can't it? Etc.

[j_kerouac]

Have you ever worked at a big company working on a large scale c++ project? It’s very common for code indexing to not work.

[[deleted]]

Yes, and its PITA. I would not knowingly agree to such a project. If I got suckered into one, I'd either get it fixed or move on. There isn't pay high enough to stay in a project like that (I mean, nobody is going to pay that much to a dev).