alt Hacker NewsSometimes I just want to open a project quickly and take a look without getting all dependencies installed and the lsp working and so on. Sometimes I want to look at another team’s project even though it’s in another language than my team works in, but I don’t want to set up that language in my environment.
This is particularly true with cpp projects, where wrestling with cmake and co just isn’t how i want to spend my time to answer a question about why something is slow or what a serialized object shape should be under various circumstances.
> Sometimes I just want to open a project quickly
Every time I've heard someone say a version of this, invariably they've spent more time doing things manually than the properly mechanised method would have achieved.
There's a seductive immediacy to certain quick & dirty manual processes that in the sum are slower if measured with a stopwatch. It could be as trivial as not having syntax highlighting means that you miss an issue because you didn't notice that something was commented out or a quoted string was quoted incorrectly.
Similarly, I've argued with many developers a few decades back that insisted that the fancy keyboard bindings of EMACS or Vim made them faster, but if raced against someone with an IDE they lost badly every time, no exceptions.