The Era of Visual Studio Code
I use VS Code every day and it&#x27;s a great platform, but to claim it&#x27;s the endgame of editors is one big hyperbole. It&#x27;s a very opinionated piece of software that serves lots of popular niches well right now, but I haven&#x27;t yet been able to find a mix of extensions that makes it a viable replacement for IntelliJ for Scala, to name one example.<p>I&#x27;d expect the next uber popular editor to be optimized towards completely different things, though. VS Code is a great all-purpose IDE for enthusiasts and professionals, who are willing and able to dig into pretty complex UIs and complicated concepts. Take the git integration – it frequently breaks (for me), and when it works, it&#x27;s really very superficial and requires me to really understand what git is doing in the background.<p>Last year I&#x27;ve tried to teach my dad how to use git, so he can put his python robotics projects in GitHub. It&#x27;s been eye-opening: All the idiosyncracies and complex ideas that I&#x27;ve grown accustomed to over the years, that&#x27;s one Eiger North Face of a learning curve if all you want to do is get those Python files on GitHub and have some people collaborate with you there.<p>It&#x27;s also pretty hard to discover functionality in VS Code. It wants to be everything to everyone, so it can&#x27;t expose functionality in a way that specialized IDEs can – and even those tend to be either messy or sort of cryptic. It&#x27;s really hard to be effective in any IDE without memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts, which isn&#x27;t a problem for software people, because we either like this, or have grown accustomed to it. I guess that&#x27;s why the Touchbar is wildly popular outside of software engineering and related disciplines – for apps that support it, it exposes functionality directly and in a context-sensitive manner.<p>Hundreds of millions of people around the world will start programming in this decade as the world is rushing into a future where code is the stuff that most of anything outside pristine wilderness that we ever experience, is at least partially made of or faciliated by, that all social, economic, political activity rests upon.<p>There is no tooling that would be appropriate for this kind of use case – whatever will end up filling that niche, the casual programmer who doesn&#x27;t want to get deeply involved with software engineering, but get their semi-complex problems solved without tasking a team of SWEs, whatever will do this will have to be a lot cleverer, easier to use, more discoverable, more intuitive – make collaboration feel much more seamless – and still be very powerful. VS Code with its laser focus on the current developer crowd is probably not very well-suited for this.