Does Visual Studio Rot the Brain? 790
duffbeer703 writes "As a UNIX guy dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows world, I've never really been able to enjoy Windows programming. Charles Petzold, who is a long-time developer for DOS & Windows really laid out the reasons for me at the NYC .NET Dev group. Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality."
For those of us who don't care (Score:5, Informative)
stfu, this article is flamebait (Score:1, Informative)
This article is crap and comments thus far are even worse. MS gets stuff wrong, but VS is not one of them.
What about Eclipse? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Help! (Score:2, Informative)
He isn't opposed to using Visual Studio itself. When guiding newbies, he instead has them create projects "from scratch" rather than using a "Windows Application" template. This at least gives them an idea of what their project is doing, and a better understanding of programming.
He also finds Intellisense to be a wonderful tool, but over-reliance on it removes the desire to actually learn how the framework works.
These factors and others are why he feels Visual Studio rots programmers' minds. Nothing to do with that it's not a plain text editor.
Re:You win the 'dumbest post of the week' award (Score:3, Informative)
In defense of the person you refer to as "idiot", I've never seen a socket wrench with language specific context sensitive help, debugger, context sensitive suggestions to correct errors and an online reference library built in before. Bad analogy. Regardless, my credit card company keeps sending me ways to spend my money. Every month my statement has 1 page of bill and about 18 little inserts all with ideas of how to make the bill expand from one to six pages. Not nearly as educational as the IDE
Your point is right that if you are using the IDE to learn a language: it's not the best idea. But an IDE can be very helpful, especially when new programmers are facing learning thousands of calls in an API as large as Windows. I know Turbo-C helped me learn a great deal back in the day.
Re:What about Eclipse? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about Eclipse? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Breakpoint and resume coding (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can sa (Score:4, Informative)
* If I see a class name I don't recognize, I can control-click to go to the class definition. If the source is not attached, I at least get a view of all the method signatures.
If you hit ctrl-t in vim, you go to the class definition (or function definition, variable definition, etc). I can't remember the keybinding in emacs, but it's in the context menu or M-x follow-tag.
* If my code invokes a method I don't recognize, I can hover the mouse over the method and the Javadoc description of the method will pop up, telling me what the method does, what the arguments are for, and what the return value is.
K in vim brings up the man pages or info pages for the defined function. I use it with Python docs; Java programmers use it with Javadoc. Emacs has similar capability.
* If I'm navigating through someone else's class hierarchy, by selecting the class name and pressing Ctrl+T I can see all interfaces this class implements, and its superclasses from which it inherits methods. If I hit Ctrl+T again, I can see all classes that inherit from this class, and what classes inherit from them, etc.
Sounds like emacs' oobr or vim's cscope interface (which is used for more than just C in vim).
If I hot Ctrl+O, I can see all the methods callable from my current cursor position. I can also see all variables within scope.
This is the only point that vim doesn't do by default yet (there are 3rd party packages to give similar completions, and vim 7 that encompasses this and a more powerful Intellisense(tm)-type thing). Emacs has this feature, though.
I think people may be missing the point (Score:2, Informative)
Visual Studio Pros and Cons (Score:2, Informative)
Pros:
It's a wonderful project management program.
The syntax highlighting and the step through code abilities were nice.
Creating command-line programs was actually easier than ever before.
MSDN.com is, surprisinigly, a really awesome resource for information.
Cons:
Creating a gui for a program was utter hell. When you start a program that has a gui, there's a bunch of code that gets written for you that you have zero control over. There's no comments explaining why it's there, and vague errors given if you mess some of it up. This may also be because the only GUI programming I've done prior to
The compiler seems a little fragile. Given that I'm not a stellar programmer, I make some syntatical errors every now and then. GCC can usually handle these, or give me useful information about what I did wrong.
Again, I'm only a moderate programmer, so maybe if code just clicks for you,
Computer Science != programming.
Noted for Win dev pubs; now Win dev IDE rots brain (Score:3, Informative)
When MSFT's best Windows development author starts complaining about MSFT's development environment, MSFT had better wake up and take notice...
Re: who's fault is that? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about Eclipse? (Score:3, Informative)
When I read the article, I was constantly thinking: "hey, Eclipse does that as well." And then, when the author expains why it's bad in VS, I realized Eclipse does it different, avoiding the problem he has with it.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:1, Informative)
is something like that (macros that turn C into
Algol).
Some comments in the BSD Almquist mention that
as the original reason for the reimplementation.