I have not used an IDE since I ditched Turbo Pascal in middle school, but now I am at a place where everyone and their mother uses VS Code and so I’m giving it a shot.
The thing is, I’m finding the “just works” mantra is not true at all. Nothing is working out of the box. And then for each separate extension I have to figure out how to fix it. Or I just give up and circumvent it by using the terminal.
What’s even the point then?
IDK maybe its a matter of getting used to something new, but I was doing fine with just vim and tmux.
Why would VSCode not be called an IDE?
No, it’s a code editor. It can become an IDE with the right set of plugins.
It’s a modular IDE.
They’re just saying that so that they have a justification for making two IDEs.
What is your definition of an IDE?
I don’t think there’s an exact definition but broadly I would say if it has the majority of these features it’s definitely an IDE:
If you make something with all those then it’s definitely an IDE. Without some of them it’s more debatable. For example the old Arduino editor… I would still say is a very basic IDE even though it doesn’t have a proper debugger - it has other heavily integrated development tools, e.g. the UART viewer.
Nobody loves arguing semantics more than a programmer. VSCode is absolutely an IDE. Jetbrains is entirely plugin based, Eclipse is totally plugin based, and yeah so is VSCode.
🙏 Happy to see this opinion somewhere else. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see folks adamant that Code-like editors aren’t IDEs while saying other plugin based editors are.