I might sound like those weird language evangelists, but...
> we could be writing all our programs in C, still.
You don't need to use C, there are other languages. For example a hello world in Free Pascal[0] (a natively compiled language with no runtime or other dependencies, which supports object oriented programming and has RTTI rich enough to implement automatic object serialization, semi-automatic memory management, strings that know about their encoding, etc) is just 32KB.
Some time ago i wrote Fowl[1], a mostly complete recreation of the OWL toolkit that came with Turbo Pascal for Windows, the demo program of which is around 80KB.
Of course for a more realistic (and MUCH easier to use and develop with) approach, you'd need something like Lazarus[2]. A minimal application in Lazarus is 2.18MB. This might sound too big... and TBH it is, but the size doesn't grow too quickly from there. For example a profiler i wrote recently for Free Pascal applications is... 2.16MB (yes, smaller, why? Well, because i replaced the stupidly huge default icon with a smaller one :-P and without the default icon a minimal application is 2.05MB so the profiler added around 100KB of additional "stuff").
> It's doing autocomplete suggestions, linting code as I type... all sorts of things we never had a couple of decades ago and are huge productivity boosters
FWIW we had those, Visual Basic (or even QBasic) would format your code as you type it, Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ 6 would profile auto-completion (VB6 even for dynamic stuff), etc. Only issue with C++ was that sometimes it wouldn't work around complex macros.
But modern editors do a bit more, still no excuse for being that sluggish. Lazarus does pretty much everything you'd expect from an IDE with smart code completion (e.g. things like declaring variables automatically, filling method bodies, etc) and code suggestions yet it runs on an original Raspberry Pi.
Now i'm not saying that you should not be using whatever you are using or that you should code on a Rasberry Pi or even to switch to Free Pascal / Lazarus (which honestly is far from being free of issues), but i think that you're overestimating what tools do nowadays and many people are so used to running slow and bloated software that take it for granted that things should be like that and cannot even imagine things being better.
Visual Assist Tomato wouldn’t have existed if Visual C++ did what you said. I use Rider (mostly) and I don’t even know how I’d program without all the features it adds. Auto import, code cleanup, code optimizations, memory allocation and boxing highlights, decompile assembly, Unity engine integration. I remember the days using Visual C++ and banging away on trying to get QT to not look ugly. I don’t miss anything about the development process from 15 years ago.
Visual Assist improves on what was already there, i never claimed that the functionality was the best it could have been (if anything i wrote the opposite) only that it existed.
But it is also an interesting thing to mention because in the last two C++ jobs i had where Visual Assist was preinstalled on my machine, i always disabled it because it was slowing down Visual Studio too much and the functionality VS provides is more than enough - VA does provide a bit more, but for me wasn't worth the slowdown.
Last time I used VAT was in 2013 and it wasn’t an issue on my i5 with an ssd. I would rather put my money into faster hardware to keep up with the demands of modern tools than live without them.
If you’re using Visual Studio for C++ I’d highly recommend Resharper C++. If you develop for Unreal Engine Rider for Unreal C++ is literally unreal, it makes me not hate writing Unreal C++ code.
I use C++ since 1993, moved into Visual C++ around version 6.0, and never used Visual Assist, or any of the JetBrains products that slow down Visual Studio to InteliJ levels of performance.
One of my key learnings with alternative languages is to always use the SDK tools from the platform vendor, everything else comes and goes, while playing catch up all the time.
I don’t understand the reasoning against modern tools under the moniker that they’re slow. If you can type out a class in a 10th the time but your ide is 40% slower (as a hypothetical impact) that is a net gain in output. In reality it’s not anywhere near a 40% slow down to use the features on computers made in the last 5 years. Anecdotal to this, I am a slowish typer (40 wpm) and because of this writing code was a long process for me. With modern tools I can produce a monstrous amount of code in a short amount of time.
Visual Studio has been pretty modern, specially when compared against traditional UNIX offerings.
Anyone measuring typing speed as productivity measurement is doing it wrong.
Writing code is around 50% of daily activities.
Visual Assist doesn't do nothing when I have to write documentation, architecture diagrams, meetings to decide roadmap items, demos at customer review meetings,....
On top of that, none of the OS SDK replacements offer better UI or debugging capabilities across the platform tooling, they just play "catch-me if you can" with what I can get on day 0 of each OS SDK release.
JetBrains wants to be Borland, yet they don't sell any of the platforms, or languages.
I guess Kotlin and Android marriage will help them, as they are trying to make it their "Delphi", lets see how it plays out if Fuchsia ever happens.
I don’t think JetBrains is going anywhere soon; been using their products for almost a decade.
I don’t measure my productivity by how much code I can write, that was just an example.
The way I work designing systems and architecture, I have already made the solution in my head and basically the “coding” part is just trying to get that info out as fast as possible. I have a similar thing to eidetic memory, but I am so ADHD what gets remembered can be random or missing stuff. I remember all code I’ve ever written, seen, or thought about and tools that allow me to basically brain dump this info greatly improve my production, leadership, confidence, and architectural designs.
It is about the feedback-response loop. If I type a character and it doesn't appear (what feels) instantaneous I start to feel physically sick. I have build up some tolerance but I think when I tried Julia with Atom three years ago, I gave up after 15 minutes (atom too much latency if I remember correctly and Julia as well)
> we could be writing all our programs in C, still.
You don't need to use C, there are other languages. For example a hello world in Free Pascal[0] (a natively compiled language with no runtime or other dependencies, which supports object oriented programming and has RTTI rich enough to implement automatic object serialization, semi-automatic memory management, strings that know about their encoding, etc) is just 32KB.
Some time ago i wrote Fowl[1], a mostly complete recreation of the OWL toolkit that came with Turbo Pascal for Windows, the demo program of which is around 80KB.
Of course for a more realistic (and MUCH easier to use and develop with) approach, you'd need something like Lazarus[2]. A minimal application in Lazarus is 2.18MB. This might sound too big... and TBH it is, but the size doesn't grow too quickly from there. For example a profiler i wrote recently for Free Pascal applications is... 2.16MB (yes, smaller, why? Well, because i replaced the stupidly huge default icon with a smaller one :-P and without the default icon a minimal application is 2.05MB so the profiler added around 100KB of additional "stuff").
> It's doing autocomplete suggestions, linting code as I type... all sorts of things we never had a couple of decades ago and are huge productivity boosters
FWIW we had those, Visual Basic (or even QBasic) would format your code as you type it, Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ 6 would profile auto-completion (VB6 even for dynamic stuff), etc. Only issue with C++ was that sometimes it wouldn't work around complex macros.
But modern editors do a bit more, still no excuse for being that sluggish. Lazarus does pretty much everything you'd expect from an IDE with smart code completion (e.g. things like declaring variables automatically, filling method bodies, etc) and code suggestions yet it runs on an original Raspberry Pi.
Now i'm not saying that you should not be using whatever you are using or that you should code on a Rasberry Pi or even to switch to Free Pascal / Lazarus (which honestly is far from being free of issues), but i think that you're overestimating what tools do nowadays and many people are so used to running slow and bloated software that take it for granted that things should be like that and cannot even imagine things being better.
[0] https://www.freepascal.org/
[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/fowl/
[2] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/