What I never enjoyed was looking up the cumbersome details of a framework, a programming language or an API. It's really BORING to figure out that tool X calls paging params page and pageSize while Y offset and limit. Many other examples can be added.
For me, I feel at home in so many new programming languages and frameworks that I can really ship ideas. AI really helps with all the boring stuff.
Same here. I like bringing ideas to life; code is just a means to an end. I can now give detailed designs to an AI and let it write the hundreds of lines of code in just minutes, and with far fewer typos than I would make. It's still not perfect - I have to review it all - but if I give it a proper spec in generally creates exactly what I had in mind.
Agree, it’s made programming so much fun. The other day I wrote a C# app just because it was the best language for the job, I’ve never touched .Net in my life. Worked great, clients loved it.
I can actually build nice UIs as a traditional ML engineer (no more streamlit crap). People are using them and genuinely impressed by them
I can fly through Rust and C++ code, which used to take ages of debugging.
The main thing that is clear to me is that most of the ecosystem will likely converge toward Rust or C++ soon. Languages like Python or Ruby or even Go are just too slow and messy, why would you use them at all if you can write in Rust just as fast? I expect those languages to die off in the next several years
Same, I did try to sell native app development to my current project, but some higher up had already decided on React Native at the time.
And I get it, it feels like native app development is a more expensive specialism, and this particular use case is mostly the customer portal but in an app. But I retain the strong opinion that if you as a company are serious about app development, if you want a good app, you need native apps and native app developers.
Especially if you want to be present outside of the confines of your app - widgets, lock screen activities, smart watches, etc all require proper native components, because they come with very tight memory constraints and just loading in React Native and its JS stuff costs you 80% of available memory budget.
As someone who use Eclipse and transitioned to Android Studio over the course of my career, Android Studio is actually pretty great. These days I use Cursor almost exclusively for Flutter, but Android Studio is great for building native Android apps.
Having used Android Studio for work for a few years and used Xcode quite a lot for longer, I find the praise for Android Studio to be puzzling. I would give it "fine" but no way I'd say it is "good". I haven't used it enough compared to Xcode to say if one is better than the other.
I would recommend trying out kilocode as a vscodium extension instead of Cursor. Better pricing and more model options. For me it completely replaced Cursor and couldn't be happier.
From all the things to work on Xcode... fixing the ghost diagnostic errors, actual hot reload instead of the nightmare Previews are, tooling to help diagnose the now messy Swift 6 concurrency code, that thing where you can't open a project and one of it's dependent swift packages for editing simultaneously ...
The list of actually useful things that can be added/changed in Xcode has more tokens than Claude is allowed to read at one time before grepping.
> you can't open a project and one of it's dependent swift packages for editing simultaneously
You can. Any local packages are automatically editable in Xcode. Opening two projects referencing the same local package dependency isn't possible however.
Editor features for editable local packages are limited, even the project inspector hides some actions and then there is the whole story of schemas, working directory (maybe you want to tweak a binary or another target in that package) etc. It’s broken and frustrating.
Used XCode in anger from 2011-2016 to develop an iOS app with several million users and found it to be just as awful and temperamental as others here describe.
For the most part it was great (IMO), and has some features I still miss in all other editors, like the automatic side-by-side toggling, using mouse gestures (on Apple's mouse) to go back / forward in history just like Safari, etc.
The most friction came from merging (e.g. when files were changed or project config was changed), due to xcode's insistence on having a project file listing all files etc. The other friction was in the annual update cycle of both xcode and the apps we built.
But the last time I tried xcode it was pretty bad; on paper the new UI coding approach is great, but in practice the live preview was so tempramental and crashed so often it was barely usable.
Thanks for the invitation! I used a C64 as my only computer in the late 1990s long past its prime, because my mother got a really good deal on a whole set with printer and disk drives and plenty of disks with software (mostly games, from magazines). However, I was still a bit annoyed by the limitations of the system. I guess, if I had had a forth disk, I might have felt different.
In any case, for personal reasons I don't want to explore the C64 more.
But I never had a GameBoy Advance nor a Wonderswan.
Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65
Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk
Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with)
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If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation console range with Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. (on these, only recommendations, no successful compiled software)
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