Heh, they had "pico" in their list of editors. If one is really hellbent on using that for Hack/Obj-C in 2015, I'm not sure whether any argument is convincing enough ;)
Generally I wasn't really that impressed by the demo. Sure, the integration is nice, but I don't see how that's different from most other IDEs. But what struck me as a bit odd was the presenter stating a preference for vim, and then starting to edit Objective-C like all you've got is your cursor keys plus tab.
So, yes, another IDE, yay. And if you work at FB, sure, mindshare alone is probably worth it. But why would one give up normal mode/macros/elisp/abbrevs etc. for that?
Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand different preferences, and if your current editor is e.g. TextMate/Sublime or an IDE like PhpStorm/Eclipse/Xcode, I can see it. But if you start with the premise that vim is the One True Editor, why would this be the switch reason, whereas IDEs before didn't get you there?
No problem with another flower in the garden of editing, I just thought the sales pitch was a bit weird.
Re: pico. You'd be surprised what editors new employees and interns use when presented with a shell prompt :-D. At FB everyone is free to use their editor of choice...we don't force Nuclide on them.
Re: what's different. Xcode does Objective-C well. IntelliJ does Java well. PHPStorm does PHP well. Tons of editors do JS well. As soon as you start mixing technologies, the IDEs quickly degrade in overall usefulness and you basically have an IDE for one tech and a dumb text editor for the other. Nuclide is opinionated and provides a nice integrated end-to-end experience if you buy into the tech it supports. If you don't use any of that tech (Hack, react, buck, react native, flow, phabricator, mercurial, etc) or only use 1 language/platform at a time (like a pure objective-c iOS app) then Nuclide basically is Atom.
Nuclide's value is super apparent with React Native. You need to be able to edit JS and Objective-C and eventually Java, and it would be nice to have all the autocomplete/click-to-symbol/code search goodies for all three. Let alone debugging all of them and jumping between the stacks. No IDE provides all the features you need for a project like React Native out of the box. So we built one (leveraging Atom of course). It is magic working on a React Native app and using the same debugging UI to step through the JS, and then the Objective-C, and then using the SAME interface to debug your Hack code on the server.
Finally, over time you'll start to see a bunch of really, really smart integration with tools and libraries like Relay and GraphQL. We already have some internally--I can "click to definition" in a GraphQL query and see where it is defined in JS, and then click through and see where it is implemented in Hack on the server. Simple symbol search can't do that and spanning multiple languages and stacks is unsupported by most IDEs. Nuclide is opinionated so we can do deep integration like that...we leave the general editor-stuff to Atom proper.
Re: clumsy demo. I actually converted from vim when we started Nuclide...I even used vim for most of my JS/Android/Hack/iOS programming. For the demo I didn't install the vi bindings because I wanted fewer things that could go wrong. Because I wasn't a huge IDE user previously you see me using the mouse a ton instead of (generally) standard IDE keyboard shortcuts.
Generally I wasn't really that impressed by the demo. Sure, the integration is nice, but I don't see how that's different from most other IDEs. But what struck me as a bit odd was the presenter stating a preference for vim, and then starting to edit Objective-C like all you've got is your cursor keys plus tab.
So, yes, another IDE, yay. And if you work at FB, sure, mindshare alone is probably worth it. But why would one give up normal mode/macros/elisp/abbrevs etc. for that?
Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand different preferences, and if your current editor is e.g. TextMate/Sublime or an IDE like PhpStorm/Eclipse/Xcode, I can see it. But if you start with the premise that vim is the One True Editor, why would this be the switch reason, whereas IDEs before didn't get you there?
No problem with another flower in the garden of editing, I just thought the sales pitch was a bit weird.