A History of IDEs at Google

A long time ago when I worked at Google, one time I took an internal class that involved a lot of pair programming. (The class was about "the craft of programming" or something like that, I don't remember the exact agenda, but it was pretty good.)

The first exercise, you got paired with someone, and then you did this dance of "what languages do we know in common?"

After that first exercise you learned that the more important dance was "what IDEs do we know in common?"

I feel like LSPs are at least partially a solution for good IDE support. The core functionality only needs to be built once, and works the same across multiple IDEs. Editor plugins might still need to exist when extending LSPs with custom requests.

It'll always be bizarre to me how corporate environments come up with solutions that try to unify people into one huge blob of replacable components.

I mean, I've seen it time and time again—when I applied to my previous company, they were forcing all people to use Visual Studio for all development, which I thought was a terrible decision and wanted to escape it to all extent possible. I jerry-rigged my way around having to use Visual Studio for the take-home task even though the recruiter gave me a resounding "no" when asked if I could switch the build system to CMake, to be able to solve the task on my Linux machine.

it's not that I think Visual Studio is a terrible tool,,
I just think it's a terrible tool.
And don't want to use it.

Fortunately once I joined, my coworker told me that JetBrains Rider has compatibility with Unreal Engine projects, which I could use, and therefore escape from one horrible IDE to another less horrible but still pretty horrible IDE. Great.

I would've loved to use VS Code with clangd, and then later on Helix, but alas. I had to remember two sets of keyboard shortcuts and maintain two colour schemes because someone made the decision on which text editor to use for me, and I couldn't just replicate my setup from home.

Only the most important part of my workflow, which is also really interoperable thanks to how universal text is, homogenised to a single standardised tool the company wants me to use. Even though every person in the room is different and would have different workflows.

But I guess most people working in big corpos just don't care about those things, and therefore it doesn't matter in the greater scheme of things.

I’m curious if Cider V has any relation to Google’s public Antigravity IDE, but I’m pretty sure Antigravity is just VSCodium + Gemini and some Google sauce…

Very curious how many Googlers are still Vim or Emacs users.... I've used most of the popular IDEs to some degree or another (enough to form an opinion about them, at least), and you can rip Vim from my cold dead fingers.