The Return of Fancy Tools

First, this is an interesting take, and I think there is some kernels to consider in it. However, the author is painting very broadly with a large brush and smudging a lot. I have been happily using PyCharm&#x2F;IntelliJ since what feels like the dawn of time. It is a perfectly complex and rewarding Fancy Tool. People still use IDEs for C&#x2F;C++ this whole time, etc. I think the author is taking their personal journey and experience and extrapolating a bit too much about trends in the industry. I found myself nodding along at times and then saying &quot;What?&quot; the next sentence.<p>My thoughts:<p>* JIRA, still heavily used in many, many places. Not even close to being replaced in them.<p>* Evernote vs. Markdown: I have been using org mode and or plain text notes for over 20 years. Markdown was a welcome addition to the arsenal, but I tried the Evernote&#x2F;Microsoft Notes back in the day... just went back to plaintext for notes+todo, it has worked forever and is good enough. Org mode is a very nice and &quot;Fancy&quot; tool on its own. But also easy to get started with.<p>Just some examples. I don&#x27;t mean to be overly critical, it is an interesting and fun article about the tools we use as technologists, but it could do with a lot better grounding all around.

&gt; Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate,<p>no it was not. people didn&#x27;t migrate from VS to Sublime, they migrated from notepad++ to Sublime. I have never met <i>anyone</i> who stopped using IDEs once they started, except maybe for VSCode with a few hundred plug-ins to reconstruct an IDE piece-wise (but with much less &quot;integration&quot; between the different plug-ins)

Must admit my comment is spurred by the first few words but my god Dreamweaver was <i>so</i> good in the early 2000&#x27;s.<p>I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school.<p>Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don&#x27;t get me started, I&#x27;ll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...

Good games should be <i>easy to approach and difficult to master</i>.<p>Good tools should be <i>easy to approach with the ability to customize and do more advanced actions, but never difficult</i><p>Good tools and products encapsulate complexity but still allow access to it where needed.<p>Good tools aim to simplify complexity, not complexify simplicity.<p>Good engineers and product people make tools that aim to simplify. Make it approachable to a n00b&#x2F;junior but no bullshit for the experienced, or at least the ability to turn off the bullshit and lock-in. Always aim to abstract complexity into simplicity, that is the job.

Fancy tools never left, you just stopped using them. I&#x27;ve been using Adobe Illustrator for art since before anything mentioned in this post even <i>existed</i>. Except Dreamweaver and Vim, if &quot;neovim&quot; counts as Vim. It is a complicated tool that has a lot of ways to easily make useless effects, and a lot of ways to easily make beautiful art.<p>Also most of the professional writers I know don&#x27;t write in Word, they write in Scrivener, which is essentially an IDE for prose. Then they export to Word and use this as a common interchange format with everyone down the line in the publishing workflow. It is a very fancy tool.<p>And really I dunno if NeoVim counts as not &quot;fancy&quot;, the first highlight on its page is a section about how extensible it is. It&#x27;s got <i>two</i> languages to write plugins in, with several screens to scroll down in the list of &quot;plugins and applications that leverage the Neovim API&quot;. That is some fancy-ass shit right there.

Amusingly, the last paragraph is almost the exact opposite conclusion I just typed on another thread, that Ctrl-P type interfaces in Vim is the future of programming UI.<p>I&#x27;ve struggled with the notetaking issue as well and think the important part isn&#x27;t the taking notes, but the processes around it. The paper&#x2F;ink based note systems that work possibly do so because they accidentally force you to refer back to things repeatedly, like the virtual note taking system they use.<p>I can certainly think of times I&#x27;ve written and then forgotten notes in ink.

This view is forced and implicitly claims there are some actual trends going on with some handpicked examples, and even then they&#x27;re quite false. Give me a break. I think this complex&#x2F;simple notion is black-and-white kind of wrong at the root of it, just throw in &quot;powerful&quot; in there and see how well that view fairs then.<p>&gt; “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The friction of having to write, to structure thoughts in plain text, to remember the name of the person I need to reference on this page: that is the point.<p>How about writing to forget it? For me, the point, more often than not, is to not have to remember what I am writing down. And if need be, come back to it later.

I equate this &quot;swinging pendulum&quot; to be more akin to optimization than just back and forth between two foci. Imagine that the problem space lies in a multidimensional landscape and humans are trying to evaluate (explore) in various directions to see which works the best. Usually, it sticks and its an obvious solution. But many things are a regression. As technologists, we should strive to have optics for this sort of thing - sometimes <i>old things are actually better</i>. We went down the wrong slope and need to walk back to the previous peak and try again.<p>Those who do not understand this tend to stick people into two buckets and then start an unending argument streak. Recognize that going back is 100% foolproof by definition - hindsight is perfect and going forward is a toss-up. If you can evaluate and have a good measure for current vs. old, don&#x27;t be afraid to leap backwards. Startups should exploit hindsight and they do.<p>There are also stagnant local optima that we need to <i>really</i> go out there to find a new peak. These we coin as revolutionary technologies that change history forever.

<i>Edit code like a grandpa in neovim...</i><p>Love it!<p>At 61 I am a grandpa, prefer GNU Emacs over vi, but still have fond memories of using vi on 4.2BSD systems. Long time ago!

&gt; JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues<p>This is absolutely... not the case.<p>Sure, for some kinds of projects Github Issues might do, but for anything &quot;real&quot; Github&#x27;s issue and project management is a serious regression.<p>---<p>These tools are not replacing anything, but addressing broader and broader markets. They lower the barrier to entry and bring more people into the fold (perhaps at the expense at having a lower ceiling of functionality).

It&#x27;s basically cause of mobile. Simple tools often involve using files. Using plain text files too. I don&#x27;t think the pendulum will swing back the same. Files are a bad abstraction. Databases via HTTP APIs are far more reliable for using between all our devices. Syncing files without something like Git is very painful and for Git to be used the user themselves need to be able to handle the diff themselves correctly. And they&#x27;d need to do this all on Mobile. It basically kills plain files for anyone except the most advanced users and requires very complicated apps (e.g. the <i>wonderful</i> WorkingCopy on iOS). The problem yet to be solved for normal users is how do you take advantage of that convenience while still letting users own their data?<p>There are some attempts but basically at the end of the day it&#x27;ll require more support from the various operating systems (mainly mobile). There needs to be some underlying open data format which can be synced easily that recreates a database locally that apps can query directly and optionally some way to proxy those requests to a central service when the device can&#x27;t&#x2F;shouldn&#x27;t have direct access to that database (lack of storage, lack of compute to run the database or app, lack of privilege&#x27;s to have possible direct access all of the data.)<p>If you can&#x27;t solve encryption, syncing, and ability to easily use the same rich data between devices and operating systems you won&#x27;t reverse the trends to move everything to these fancy tools which almost all end up being centralized and requiring the user to be online regularly even for data which only their own devices would ever be using.

I probably won&#x27;t pick CS as my undergrad study if I haven&#x27;t used dreamweaver to create website for my classmate when I was just 12 years old (hand-type html, css is a bit much for me that time. And Dw allows your to set hyperlink, an on hover event easily, js is hard to grasp for me that time ) .<p>So I always think it&#x27;s good to have a low barrier for people to get in.

I think there is something with this, and the minor resurgence of interest in C. I think people learn about the issues with memory and threads in C, use some other language and come back to C with better appreciation for what can go wrong and better care to keep things safe. C is the less fancy tool. It gets out of the way as much as VS Code does.

This resonates.<p>Another way to look at it is how we got to simple tools to beginwith: tech-driven industry disruptions. A wave of sw replacement came for tools that are mobile-friendly and support collaboration, like Google docs &amp; spreadsheets, and Figma. Mobile &amp; live collaboration are so important that feature-poor versions of older tools ate giant market share from Microsoft Office, which is 15% of Microsoft&#x27;s revenue, and the same at Adobe and others.<p>But Office, Adobe, and friends built up all those features for market-driven competitive reasons. Startups in new spaces get head starts of 2-3 years in consumer, and then maybe a couple more if b2b, but that&#x27;s it. It doesn&#x27;t last forever: capital is a moat, and part of that is by building a feature factory, which massive companies like to do. MS and Adobe went SaaS and mobile a few years ago, and they&#x27;re actively competing here now.

fsv, which is a clone of fsn (the file system navigator seen in the film Jurrasic Park) is still around and useable even though it&#x27;s not maintained anymore:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcuelenaere&#x2F;fsv" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mcuelenaere&#x2F;fsv</a>

Google cache link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:gnWsEkz8oQ4J:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;macwright.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;16&#x2F;return-of-fancy-tools.html+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:gnWsEk...</a>

<i>Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code</i><p>No-one switched from VS to TextMate or Sublime except the author. There’s virtually no overlap in workflows.<p>I can absolutely believe people switched from either to VSC, as they are designed for similar workflows.

Dialectical materialism but for tech.

A tool maps user inputs to results. A programming language is fine-grained - complex input to desired result. A fancy tool is coarse-grained - simple input to result.<p>As an industry matures, what users want to do is better known and methods for doing are developed, so a coarse-grained mapping becomes possible - on both ends.<p>But this process can cross industries above, obsoleting entire roles; and below, creating new roles.<p>A &quot;role&quot; is something requiring complex user input to specify a result.

&gt; <i>Everything for the next few years will slowly fade in as you scroll. I don’t know why.</i><p>I don’t understand why either. Does fade-in make a webpage more aesthetically pleasing? Or serve a functional purpose like improving readability or increasing conversion? To me it distracts from understanding the content and can even lead to janky rendering when implemented poorly.

I spotted this trend a long time ago. I see it everywhere: software tools, clothes, cars, you name it. It&#x27;s called fashion. I decided to opt out. I use timeless tools like emacs and bash. I wear timeless clothes like trousers and shirts. I drive whatever reliable car is available at the time. I haven&#x27;t got time to keep up with the whims of fashion.

Another example: Java and C++ got disrupted by Python and Ruby, which were considered to be much simpler to read and write, but now we are seeing more static typing, for example Python with type hints and friendlier static languages like Go&#x2F;Kotlin&#x2F;Swift. Perhaps mirrors the shift between text editors and IDEs.

The cycle also goes hand-in-hand with languages and frameworks. I use VSCode for Ruby on Rails editing, but I don&#x27;t need to. With TypeScript, however, it&#x27;s a huge win -- just as IDEA or Eclipse were essential for Java, back in the day.

Well said: &quot;[...] the names of things, their functionality, and how it all fits together should be things that exist in one’s mind, not just in a computer.&quot;

When I see articles like these I usually:<p>1. cmd+f &#x27;linear&#x27;<p>2. see result<p>3. smile

Linear looks nice. Anyone using it?

I really enjoyed this take. I hadn&#x27;t thought of our tools going from complex to simple and back again. Insightful.

Webflow is a service, not a tool. Unfortunately.