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My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

(jeffhuang.com)
242 points simonebrunozzi | 3 comments | 11 Dec 25 19:30 UTC | HN request time: 1.208s | source
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analogpixel ◴[11 Dec 25 22:00 UTC] No.46237814[source]▶
I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked (without a monthly subscription.)

There is also this article today: https://jon.recoil.org/blog/2025/12/an-svg-is-all-you-need.h... about how great good ol' svg is. And then every recurring article about using RSS instead of all the other siloed products.

textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

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1. johnfn ◴[11 Dec 25 22:37 UTC] No.46238286[source]▶
Surely there are some!

I think AI is the obvious one. Also, VSCode (or whatever modern IDE you use) is definitely better than the IDEs that existed 20 years ago. LSP is fantastic. Hm... StackOverflow was definitely a step change over existing tools. Godot is really good, much better than anything that came before, IMO. Modern languages are pretty good these days - Rust and TypeScript are better than languages in the 2000s, to name two of the top of my head.

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2. abraxas ◴[11 Dec 25 23:34 UTC] No.46238885[source]▶
Quite honestly if you put ai aside and just look at VsCode and typescript which is a common drug of choice these days the Java plus Eclipse of 20 years ago was the superior toolkit. At least semantic search and refactoring worked reliably.
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3. hatthew ◴[12 Dec 25 01:02 UTC] No.46239650[source]▶
Eclipse was great for java specifically, but a lot of its useful/reliable features came from java being easy to standardize around. Strong static typing and javadocs combined allow for a lot of convenient and reliable features like previews, intellisense, refactoring, etc. For me, vscode feeling worse come from the fact that I'm using it for python and javascript which are inherently harder to design IDE features for, and also vscode is designed to be a good all-round programming editor, not a java-specific editor.

Taking its broader scope into account, I feel like vscode is a significantly better IDE than eclipse, though if I went back to exclusively coding in java and nothing else ever, I might switch back to it.