John Carmack: Best programming setup and IDE | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

Sounds like Carmack disagrees that "real programmers use COPY CON FILENAME.EXE"

Programmers created the debugger to simplify your coding process. Use it...

He spent a single week trying out raw Vi - which IIRC has not seen active development this millennium - and decides only "his Visual Studio" will work for him.

OK, fair enough, it's Carmack and he's not wrong, but he's not right either. Idolizing him doesn't help. He is just a programmer with another opinion. I too work with "modern" IDEs like Jetbrains'. These are excellent products to be sure, but let's not beat around the bush. These are commercial products that will inevitably fall or, more likely, fade away. They offer little in the way of customization and are certainly not going to be around your entire life.

Emacs is another beast entirely. Comparing those products with something like Emacs .. I mean, it's not even wrong. I know "modern programmers" don't have time to do shit, least of all learning, so we have to hit the ground running and we can use all the hand-holding we can get. I get that and it's true.

It's just not something to be proud of, but that's just my opinion.

Hi, I am an ex-vim ex-linux Tech Lead🐸

Well, so much for his monitor set up

vi rocks!

I love John's voice. There is a small hint of young a Forrest Gump in his accent.

True. I always run in Debug to check everything works correctly.
Many of my friends are just using Write to console or write to log. Their work flow is so inefficient...

Take a shot every time Carmack the GOAT says “side of things”

Heroes

These guys are fascinating. All-night programming to make a Mario killer. I wished I was raised with people that where as constructive as these guys.

I was raised in allot of useless scum who drink loads of alcohol and use drugs...and that's all they do and know.

And yes visual studio is as good as it gets for IDE handling the c++. Only thing I recommend as must have plugin for VS is the 'whole tomato'.

People who are obsessed with VIM and the like are goofballs.

A proper gdb interface made me use and stay with VS Code on Linux.

Please don't confuse yourself with John. John knows everything about computers and software engineering that's why IDEs make him much more productive. You, on the other hand, know next to nothing and IDE hides tons of complexity from you. When a catastrophy occurs John know immediately why it happened and how to fix it. For you it will takes weeks to figure it the root cause. My advice is to use simple tools and do all the busy work yourself: create files manually, debug from terminal, list all the compile time flag explicitly and so on. Eventually you will gain deep understanding of this stuff and switch to a good IDE which will be your partner in crime and not a black box it appears now.

If found that using copy-and-paste is the number one problem in programming!

You should never use it, retype what you want and you'll think about every character.

If you rely on an IDE for programming, you're lazy.

What he said about debuggers is so true! I've used them and solved complex problems in short period of times. 99% of the time, the programmers could not "visualize" what was actually happening in memory.

Not using an IDE is just dumb, not using a debugger is handicapping yourself. However, do what works for you but don't complain if somebody works faster and more efficient than you.

Dude I promise I’m a programmer. Everything glasses dude says is exactly what I do. Have a problem with code I insert a breakpoint at every line and see what object is returning null or whatever. Hard to believe lex is a programmer the way he talks.

Wow., amazing that JC uses the debugger to verify his code. That's what unit tests are for.

I find vim great for small stuff or small changes in big files. A quick edit here or there. Making a config file change, etc. Anything much more than that and I use an IDE.

My setup: Lex: 1.25x. John: 0.75x

`I am more in favor in the stuff that you cannot run your program until you fix this [error] rather than you can run it and hopefully unit-test will catch it.`:
Could not agree more ...

Luke Smith said it best: the worst part about Vim is how much of a colossal idiot you feel like for not learning it sooner.

I can't imagine programming without breakpoints. I'm not sure how many companies are hostile to them.

Good IDEs and debuggers is what changed my mind about programming - took an entry-level compsci class in college using Linux/C/no IDE... absolutely hated it. 5 years later, took a class using Eclipse/Java (okay, that was fine, got me more interested - like, I can do this, it can be a little fun)... and then took another class using Visual Studio/C# making a desktop app... and I WAS HOOKED. It felt like magic (intellisense, debugging, etc). Felt productive and happy. Never looked back.

Its helpful that Lex actually knows programming to the extent that he can respond in an intelligent manner. Its definitely intimidating to interview someone like John Carmack, arguably one of the greatest programmers in the world.

Where can I go to find the best programmer ready to co found a start up with myself?

This is exactly why Carmack got where he got. The amount of arrogance in the coding world is staggering. And the testing team is always the underdog telling dev they are not as great as they think they are and better start using DEBUGGERS! lol

Geez dude... I'm studying programming but every time I watch an interview with the programmer it makes me not want to program if I'm going to be like them

gdb, the debugger "of choice?" on Linux, basically sucks. seriously sucks. I prefer visual studio, whose debugger is basically the best on the planet.

Truth. If you think you can keep it all in your head, particularly when the data is complex and unconstrained, you are deceiving yourself or writing hello world.

I wonder what percentage of people doesn't use debuggers today, I felt like everyone did but after this interview I wonder?

I use vim-mode in everything, including Chrome. :)

Vim is brilliant. But most of my IDE usage is not spent typing code. I'm moving around, ctrl-clicking into functions, going forward and back, regex searching the entire codebase, and selecting and copying blocks of code. All things perfectly suited to a keyboard and mouse and setting debug breakpoints and running it in quick cycles. Yes I can do all those things with Vim+GDB, but Vim is more suited to quick text actions in single files and its tagging is just not as good as the IDEs. I can get close, but the mental overhead of using Vim is instantly dissolved with an IDE and then I can focus on code rather than navigation.

Carmack isn't alone on his opinions on IDEs. I know some extremely good programmers that have left vim and emacs behind for more modern IDEs.

I'm a web developer who works primarily in Elixir & Typescript. I haven't used a debugger in years.

Funny the devs using new vim with only a keyboard but when the they open their website to test they use a mouse.

yaeh i've been working for a fortune 500 corp (not tech tho) for 5 years now and at the start i was coding perl in vim and notepad++ without a debugger, barely able to run things in a purely test environmnet.... now finally we're getting to the point where we're actually using an IDE connected to our repo, being able to run things locally and have a frigging visual merge tool.... life is getting better

This man’s a legend, can’t wait to watch.

Love the comment about AI-powered debugging - I see that as a huge time saver, "how did this property end up as null?", "what functions update this variable?" etc.

There's two camps. Those that use a debugger, and those that don't admit they use a debugger

Grok

Wait also a decent mechanical keyboard is another great to-do

How the fuck can he not use keybinding and primarily prefer the mouse? What a lazy hacker and a Luddite


You can use the emacs / Vim keybindings in VS Code, too! I guess he just didn't learn it early enough in his life

I've really gotta get a debugger, profiler, and GitHub Copilot going at at work

I step through all of my functions as I make them, and I rely heavily on the debugger to do that. Over the years that has just coalesced to be my way of doing it. Interesting to hear Carmack say he does it similarly. I always thought my technique was a lazy crutch and that I should try harder to see more in my mind. Maybe the best code really is the laziest code

3 monitors are a requirement for me
documentation/debugger/ide - laptop screen for emails and corp chat