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I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either. Zed isn't the first. It's been 10 or 15 years since I started seeing multi-
by eddythompson80 1mo ago
I don't understand the fixation the industry has on multi-player development either. Zed isn't the first. It's been 10 or 15 years since I started seeing multi-player development (sometimes called peer programming in an earlier iteration) being championed in various ways. VS, Intellij, Eclipse, and vscode had plugins for it and all of them are from the 2015-2018 time. One can even say that the Google Wave demo from 2007 was one of the earliest demonstrations for this concept.
I even worked on a team where one engineer loved the idea and championed doing it as early as 2013. Most of these IDE extensions didn't exist back then. He ended up picking a buddy, and they moved to the same office, hooked 2 keyboards and 2 mice into the same PC and spend literally the entire day alternating who's writing code in the same IDE.
I think the concept was supposed to be about helping developers share their skills. Every developer has an experience of looking over somebody's shoulder and having an "oh shit, I didn't realize there is a shortcut/tool/command for that" moment. And the idea with multi-player programming is to get you to see that and learn from it more. But. It. Doesn't. Work.
- mtklein 1mo agoDon't forget SubEthaEdit! That was the first multiplayer editor I recall. Never found a use for this sort of thing once novelty wore off. :/
- singpolyma3 1mo agoIt does work. Very well. The code quality, problem solving, and knowledge transfer are all insanely better when pairing properly.
- hackinthebochs 1mo agoPair programming is the extroverts answer to the solitariness of software development. They love it while everyone else is hating their existence. It works for short stints to solve specific problems but anything beyond that is just gratuitous.
- eddythompson80 1mo agoWell now i feel stupid. For 10+ years I thought it was peer not pair for some reason, but pair programming makes much more sense. And lol yes! if you knew the dude who wanted to try that, you would know what an “extrovert” was. He was the most extroverted engineer dude I have met to date.
- sdenton4 1mo agoIf Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are wrong, I don't want to be right.
- notpachet 1mo agoGNU Screen has supported multiuser editing since 1993. "You newer models are happy scraping the shit... because you've never seen a miracle"
- SwellJoe 1mo agoI guess I have occasionally used screen or tmux to help someone out before, but it was a few minutes, and not a regular occurrence.
- eddythompson80 1mo agoI’ve done that in my own tmux sessions. But due to the ungodly way tmux handles terminal sizing (which I don’t know how else they could) I assumed it was a me-problem.