After watching video about acme in this article , which introduces the concept of Integrating Development Environment instead of Integrated Development Environment which usually abbreviated to IDE, i thought to myself “why not having a development environment without integration at all?”. This might sound crazy for some people, but this is my development environment at the time of writing this post.
Just to be clear, this approach might not be suitable for some software development, such as game development. The point is, this post is just for reference about someone else’s development environment.
In my time as a linux user, not even as a software developer, i realize that there’s a cost of integration and one of them is maintenance. Here’s a little bit of a back story when i found that out. Back then when i use elementary OS, which is ubuntu-based linux distro, i try to upgrade into the newer version, and guess what? I can’t use the “default” image viewer. Because i can’t use the “default” image viewer, i need another image viewer which lead me to install another image viewer. Now i have 2 image viewer on my system which i feel like redundant. So, as a new linux user, i try to uninstall the “default” image viewer, and guess what? It break the entire desktop environment. Isn’t that nice? Like hell it is!
That incident make me realized that when we tightly integrated our software with each other, when one software break or missing, our system might falling apart.
Another example is the “breaking changes” culture of modern software development. In my observation, software development nowadays does not really care about improving user experience, it’s more like making the changes for the sake of “there’s some new changes”. Whether those new changes is useful to the user or not, that doesn’t really matter.
The point is, when something break because of an update in our integration system, it’s kind of hard to find out the problem. Especially if we’re using “modern software” which most likely introduce “breaking changes” on every release.
My base development environment is tmux, and my text editor is vim. Other
than that? I use shell. The majority of my workflow is using shell.
I didn’t integrate my text editor or shell with tmux. I could change my
text editor or shell to something else, and it won’t effect my tmux
configuration. When i changed my tmux configuration or tmux introduce
breaking changes, it won’t effect my text editor or shell.
Because my development environment is not integrated with each other, i have the flexibility of changing things. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depends on personal preferences.
So, the point is that we need to approach integration with caution. Not everything need to be integrated with each other. We also need to realize that integration has a cost, and one of them is maintenance.