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."
yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a good friend whose son is brilliant. He looks at anything, and instantly is taking it apart and putting it back together. In our technical day and age, he has tinkered with computers a LOT and has shown great acumen in troubleshooting and configuring not only Windows, but putting together a network.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
He is now taking some programming classes, and while he is doing well, they have begun java, and it has totally thrown him. He's getting back on his feet, but his initial foray into VS gave him some bad (and some wrong) insights into programming and languages.
His reaction so far to having to actually write and understand code is that it is stupid. I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe. He is doing well in his class but he constantly wants to go back and do the drag and drop thing.
who's fault is that? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a reason we start with printf("Hello World."); and not with dragging a text box into a big white rectangle.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there's no reason you can't do printf("Hello World."); in Visual Studio. I too started in BASIC, because that's what was available. Frankly, "drag some buttons onto a gui and get an app that looks cool and does nothing" is EXACTLY where I would start a child today. They'll do that maybe twice, then want the buttons to do something and go from there.
Or I could edit a text file, run a couple command line apps and wind up with a command line app that prints "Hello Wo
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then start them out with "The Incredible Machine" or some other mousetrap-alike where the objective is to build the most complex functioning thing possible with weird widgets provided to the operator. You give them a taste for making something without giving them any kind of tool that will force bad habits upon them. If they go off and end up using Visual Studio for GUI programming, well, that will happen to some, but others may never see the GUI programming stuff and go straight into building complex machines using letters and syntax instead of using drag and drop.
I had other vast, varied tools at my disposal. I had a LOGO program. I had ROM Basic, GW Basic, Quick Basic, and Power Basic. I had Borland C/C++ for DOS. I had a Texas Instruments calculator and a graphlink cable. I had gcc. I don't doubt that my Basic programming experience caused problems for when I tried to move on to C, but at least I wasn't thinking that making fancy dialogue boxes was programming compared to writing the back end of something.
I started with MS-DOS, but Microsoft's real hard push for their GUI hit in 1993, when I was thirteen. I found that after years of GUI, when I started playing with programming, being able to control things that I had done myself through the command line was insanely cool. It was like opening the hood of a car or taking the case off of a complex electronic device. I felt like I was gaining more mastery over the computer itself, rather than just using it. I'd suspect that many kids that are the 'take it apart and find out why' type would feel similarly.
Rubbish! (Score:3)
Bah! All you children, with your fancy gizmos and whirleygigs. Why, when *I* was a budding hacker, we had to flip bits with a TIDDLEYWINK! And we LIKED it that way!
All you kids with your fancy interactive terminals, and your 300-baud modems, and your higher-level languages. "Ooo, my BASIC is SOOOOOOO powerful!" "Logo could do that in a jiff or less!" Ha! Nowadays, you kids just don't know the first damned thing about
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe. But when I was getting into coding, any suspicion that what I was doing was a toy, and not the real thing would have killed my interest. I wanted to write programs that looked and felt just like the "real" ones, and these days that means a GUI. I'll admit, I'm speculating, not speaking from experience. I coded for 4 different command-line-only OSes before I ever saw a GUI; and I scoffed at the first one I saw (Mac) a
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the article the speaker noted that he recommends people start a new VS 'empty' project, not a Windows Forms project.
They then have control, and can intentionally add the features they desire.
People who know how to drop widgets on forms know only that. People who know how to code can also drop widgets on forms.
I think people should learn to code, and then pick up tools that improve their productivity. Start with the basics first, learn what's happening and why, and you'll be far better than if you merely
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? They are both levels of abstraction. I don't think too many of us programmers got our start in assembly. I personally started with BASIC on a 286. An abstracted language whose major feature was ease of use. I don't think there is a fundemental difference other than visual abstraction is used to easily create visual applications and textual abstraction was used back in the day to generate textual programs.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're definitely right, but I think that starting out with the high-level languages is a good balance between abstraction and being able to have some powerful control. Start too high (Visual Studio, etc) and you risk not being able to easily understand what's really going on. Start too low (ASM) and you may be too frustrated to continue... or may not be able to understand 'the big picture' when it comes to programming.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Having line numbers really helped me focus on getting the architecture of a program first, because there wasn't any easy way of changing line numbers (apart from some extra assembly language routines that could be loaded into spare memory).
The editor of Visual Studio isn't too bad, but the MFC/.NET dialog editor is terrible. You should move him onto Trolltech's designer for Qt.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
When I was a kid, I had to write the Hello World program using only 0's.
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
I banged two rocks together and cousin Ugg just "got it".
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
In my day, we had to create a religion that induced the masses to spend millions of man-hours moving stones just to get a working calendar!
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Funny)
Wimp.
Creation of the loop structure... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:5, Funny)
--
MP
Re:who's fault is that? (Score:3, Funny)
(in case you're wondering, gcc compiles that just fin
Re:C complications (Score:5, Insightful)
And, *no*, you do not have to understand anything about rendering black or whatever. No Fourier transforms or 11-dimension existentialism either. (The only "strings" for you are scalars!)
Anyway, your code in Perl:
perl -e'while(){print int rand 99.99?" ":"."}'
Written in a term, by the way.
Re: who's fault is that? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Insightful)
It is too bad that the
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Interesting)
The important thing, For what it is designed for is exactly right on the button.
VS and VS.NET, are *primarily* rapid application development environments. They try to serve the developer by offering all the cool intellisense mojo and whatnot, and try to serve the employer of said developer by trying to make said developer more productive.
I for one think that MS does a pretty damn good job of this...
However, I can see the validity of Mr. Petzold's complaints. The code th
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully this analogy makes sense. Basically, don't assume that just because somebody's preferred modality is different from yours, that makes it faulty.
Apples and Oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
Visual Studio is not a teaching aid. It's (just about) a programming toolkit with some bolted on frameworks. You will create rubbish if you do not know what you are doing. Try thowing eclipse at him, he would have the same problem.
Having said that, I hate having to program with Visual Studio. It's like a great big book of usefull spells, but they are written in invisble ink
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Insightful)
Force? noone's forcing me to use the RAD tools; I use VS primarily as an editor with intellisense and solution/project file management; no more, nor less. FUD.
- Oisin
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly.
Some projects at my company were written by people who did not know how to program well. Others of us follow well-organized, structured development.
Their code looked like the Microsoft sampl
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Interesting)
And let us not forget the wonderful code examples given in the Microsoft documentation that you can cut'n'paste into a project, where they will compile without error and then fail silently at runtime. (CreateFile, anyone?)
But then, what do you expect from an outfit that believes a BOOL is tri-state [microsoft.com]. (one would have thought that would have been fixed by now, but n
Fun, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
'Zackley! There's really more fun to be had, since sometime in the near past, MS actually added a 'bool' type (but not to be confused with 'BOOL').
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:4, Insightful)
The places where Visual Studio excels is in some of the following:
Code/syntax highlighting
Structure/layout
Designing graphical aspects (forms, window layouts, etc.)
And others
One of my favorite features is the form of auto-completion and showing function prototypes. You don't have to have memorized the entire Win32 API to be a "good" programmer. Documentation comes in many forms and by having the IDE tell you when you open a parenthesis what the function expects as inputs is just another way of looking at the docs.
The one place where I think that an IDE can cause some harm for new programmers is the "shake-and-bake" method of designing an app where it asks 10 questions and writes the code for you. Past that, IDEs are a great tool for managing larger programming projects.
Ok, back in 1995 (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, we have Eclipse, and _I_ have GCJ, and SWT. And I don't need Visual Studio to make a standalone dialog EXE.
So I don't use it.
Or maybe it's the fact that I can use Eclipse for my web development too. And the same with Java.
Or maybe it's that Eclipse does so much more than syntax highlighting. Refactoring is solid with Eclipse. CVS support is flawless (to the extent of the capabilities of CVS) . Working with Eclipse feels, now, the same that Vis
What we have here, ladies and gentlemen... (Score:3, Funny)
So far I count a distinct lack of insults towards nmb's parents, and not a single reference to his sexuality.
You win the 'dumbest post of the week' award (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a tool. Does your socket wrench teach you how to build a house? Do your credit cards tell you how to spend your money?
Someday, somehow the Microsoft bashing needs to end, or at least be about something intelligent. If you are a programmer, well versed in the basic concepts of code, both procedural and OO, then all that Visual Studio will do for you is increase your productivity in what ever you are planning to create in the programming lang
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 litt
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Interesting)
But, taking stuff apart doesn't make you brilliant. Most of us geeks took things apart when we were kids. People around us said the same things you're saying about so and so's kid. The kid is stumped with java because he's having to go beyond instant gratification and actually learn something. There is a fundamental difference between just discovering random facts and learning ideas that have depth. Just because he can play video games or memorize oodles of random computer facts, or fankly, even put a network together, doesn't mean much. I'm not saying the kid isn't smart, most geeks are "smart", few are brilliant.
It's good for him to struggle. He'll find out if he's really brilliant. His response that the ideas are stupid is just his ego combined with youth. Does he think math is stupid too?
My point is that visual studio isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that mucking about with computers is equivalent to learning difficult things. Whipping up some crappy kid-app in Visual Basic is about as difficult as Whipping up some crappy speakers in woodshop. It no more makes you a programmer, or dare I say, a computer scientist, than building the crappy speaker makes you an acoustic engineer.
The kids problem isn't visual studio, the kids problem is that the stuff he's done requires tinkering and doing but no hard thinking. Now he's being forced to think and it sounds like he's finding out that it's not quite as easy as just doing. That's good!
ymmv.
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:4, Insightful)
This only demonstrates that Visual Studio is a bad environment for "teaching yourself", not that using Visual Studio is a bad thing in our professional lives. VS has fully fledged languages behind it (nothing stopping you from compiling/linking from the command-line...). There is nothing about VS that intrinsically limits the depth of one's understanding.
For Professionals: I think this point from the professional's perspective is really well covered by Andy Hunt and David Thomas in Section 35 of "The Pragmatic Programmer": "Evil Wizards".
In summary: If you use code generated by wizards and other similar tools without understanding what that code does, you are going to run into problems. Wizards and generators are tools that can increase your productivity (why bother writing code a computer can write for you?), but if you don't understand what they're doing, then you are going to run into troubles. Finally, their tip: "Don't use wizard code you don't understand".
For students: Regardless of the language/environment that kids start on, they need someone to guide them. They need to be taught the underlying concepts behind functions and classes. They need to be taught a few fundamental design concepts. They need to be taught some of the common idioms. If they aren't then how can they get it right? For the VS learners, it will be the flashy wizard generated dialogs that do very little, and ungracefully. For the console/C learners, it will be the almost-as-flashy text based menus (generated with reams of printfs), that do very little, and ungracefully.
Yeah - I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program.
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Funny)
Shoulda started with Perl. Everyone knows Perl is the best language for learning quality programming skills.
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Insightful)
As deep as VS "allowed" him? WTF are you talking about? I've used VS every workday for 7 years. I gather it has some sort of functions for making cute screens with buttons on them? I wouldn't know, I've never written a gui app.
He's a kid. He wanted to make something he thought was cool; and he did, good for him. It makes sense he went for the drag-together an EZ-GUI stuff; He made something that looked cool and didn't do much. I'm guessing "looks cool" was his design target.
Heck, I first got into programing (time to date myself) writing BASIC programs to draw maps of D&D dungeons. 99% of what I learned in my first months of coding was the details of the particular extended ascii set my computer suported. I learned useless trivia and wrote lousy code in pusuit of eye-candy. But eventually, I wanted to move a marker around the dungeon, then I wanted to keep track of what was in different rooms. Today I make a fairly nice living writing complex C++ without a bit of eye-candy anywhere near it.
In short, leave the kid alone. Soon enough he'll want those cute buttons to do real stuff. If adults can be kept from eliminating his fun by insisting that "real" programs can't look good, he'll be a crackerjack coder in no time.
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh Jeez, get over yourself.
You've completely ignored the subtleties of a choice made by an intelligent mind when presented with different ways to do things. I find it fascinating he went right to the GUI and started developing code that way. Instead, you're peeved he didn't start figuring out what include files to use to do a printf() to a console.
Maybe the path he blazes will be the next paradigm. History is full of people making huge leaps in technology by finding easier ways to do things that interested them, but were against the norm.
Viewed from this perspective, I think you should step off and let him learn what he wants how he wants, and not in a way that pleases you.
Re:Shut up DINOSAUR (Score:5, Insightful)
If the first tool you introduce someone too teaches people, particularly bright kids, not to think about...
Re:Shut up DINOSAUR (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a friggin kid we're talking about. What did you do when you were programming as a kid, if you did ? I know i tried to have the computer display fancy stuff, in stupid ways. I wrote some sort of "demos" consisting of loops likeor composed some sort of animations in an ascii 8x8 grid because i didn't know of sprites and all the stuff. That was probably stupid, utterly useless, and definitely not the good tool for the job. I should have been using assembly at the time, and some sort of backbuffer instead of calling cls... But what the heck, that's what made me love programming. At the time i remember i tried to join some computer clubs, but they all were doing some things i thought were utterly boring, like learning how to use spreadsheets, or having programs "behave in an intelligent way" (that is, validating input...).
They were right, validating input is more than necessary in even the most stupid program, and using a spreadsheet instead of making a custom program yourself for each formula is certainly a good idea. But it wasn't fancy, and was very boring to do... Let this kid alone, he'll understand soon enough that you can certainly make nice looking programs with vs, but you have to learn programming to have them do anything usefull. And if he's really interested, he'll learn that too. And i'll congrat him because frankly, when i was a kid learning to program 8 bit computers was certainly a fun thing to do, but now with all the stuff you have to know, the fact that you can only access the computer via stupid apis that you have to learn, you have to be really interested by it to find it amusing. Computers are boring nowadays, seriously...
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:3, Interesting)
This year our computer science department switched to Visual Studio, and I can say without qualms that they couldn't have made a worse decision. Now we are forced to use VS.NET because the professor can't run the programs to grade it without .vcproj and .sln files.
Fortunately, this is not my first foray into C/C++, and I am quite used to writing programs in vim and compiling on the command line at my job, so usually I just import the source into VS.NET and compile to make sure it doesn't produce any strang
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise, Visual Studio is a great way to generate code, and can be a great tool for professionals. But teaching people to program with it is another matter. Visual Studio completely abstracts these beginning programmers from what the program is actually doing, and without and understanding of what's going on under the hood, you aren't much of a programmer.
Re:yes, it does rot your brain, or at least habits (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone here seems to be under the impression that Visual Studio hides the source/nuts and bolts/inner workings from you. It doesn't. You can program assembly and K&R C if you so wish. (Using Visual Basic/J++/C# is a different thing, but that's more of an argument against those languages than Visual Studio.)
Granted, you can draw a dialog box by hand, but you can also create that dialog by assigning an HWND to point to the result of a CreateWindowEx(). You can also manually code your own .rc resource scripts and use the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro. Do whatever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, but don't say Visual Studio is t3h n00b! shift+1
Help! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Help! (Score:3, Interesting)
Apache server with a virtual host to my home directory.
Mount home directory via samba to my windows workstation.
SSH into apache machine for cvs access and other tools like grep
Jedit for development.
Now I work like this.
ASP.NET using visual studio.
IIS running on local machine.
I can't tell you how less productive I am using ASP.NET. It's mind boggling really. First of all visual studio is a pig, it sucks up virtually all t
Re:Help! (Score:3, Interesting)
I once worked on a Websphere 5 app where the project was in Websphere Studio. Any slight change to the app required using the deploy feature in WAS Studio and on my 900Mhz laptop that took 40-50 minutes.
Breakpoint and resume coding (Score:5, Interesting)
Get on Mac OS X, and start coding using Xcode. You may drool once you find the Fix & Continue (ZeroLink) feature.
Re:Breakpoint and resume coding (Score:5, Informative)
Great quotes (Score:5, Interesting)
> This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a
> program not as a complete coherent document,
> but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects.
So true. You can't "read" the program, instead, you can only leap about from handler to handler. And another good point when talking about a XAML demo:
> It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks
> of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML.
I'm not sure about this one - seems that one of the few times that duplicated code is OK is when it's in generated code; i.e., in a JavaCC-generated parser. For everything else, there's CPD, the Copy/Paste Detector [sourceforge.net].
Coral Cache (Score:2)
Force? (Score:5, Interesting)
Visual Studio (VS newer than VS 6, up to and including VS 2005) is in the top 3 products MS has ever produced (behind MS Office and MS SQL Server). Powerful, flexible, and yes, it allows for very rapid development.
Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Hardware (keyboards, mice,
2) Developer tools
I find Microsoft tools like VS.net and even some of their languages (C#) to be surprisingly good.
Granted, I prefer Open Source most of the time, but when forced to use certain Microsoft things like Natural Keyboards or Visual Studio, I kind of like them.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for supporting them, but hey I'm just being honest.
Re:Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:5, Funny)
This is Slashdot. You would have been modded down for supporting them, but you always get mod points for pointing out that you would be modded down.
Now I'm going to be modded down for not being very funny.
Re:Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:5, Insightful)
The authors gripes about not being able to see the code in it's entirety are complete BS. All you have to do is expand the conveniently hidden setup and autogenerated code and you can read to your hearts content. The default is to hide most of that code because frankly, it's insignificant. Do you really need to see the declarations for the 250 objects on your form? Do you really need to see the wrappers around database drivers? No and No.
Are you going to claim that a mechanic who uses the computer in your car to tell him you have a bad sparkplug is a bad mechanic? Or are you going to be quietly grateful that he was able to fix your problem for $50 in 1/2 an hour instead of the old school "hard core" method of slowly replacing part after part until you figure out which was the broken one, which costs you lots of time and money?
Re:Microsoft DEVELOPER tools are good (Score:5, Funny)
Since this is /., I'm going to denounce anyone who buys pre-made cars instead of smelting and molding the steel themselves. Let's face it, those who don't design and implement the whole engine and drivetrain, on a lathe, by hand, are girly men at best. Furthermore, if you ever did use a mechanic, I'm going to question your worth as a human being and mock your nickname. In this case, I'll observe that the parent is named "captain craptacular," which hardly inspires confidence.
Top Down / Bottom Up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Top Down / Bottom Up (Score:5, Interesting)
Eclipse does something like IntelliSense, but it does it correctly, assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct.
Basically, Eclipse doesn't do anything while you're typing. If you type out "id" and a space, it stays "id" with a space after it. In fact, Eclipse won't do anything if you just type "id." It will only start offering suggestions after you enter a period to access an object's properties and methods. Even then, if you're typing fast enough, it won't pop up anything. If you pause, it will display a list, but it won't alter your typing unless you press enter. So if you have a new object, and you decide it needs an "id" field, which you haven't defined yet, you can simply do "object.id = foo;" and Eclipse won't replace "id" with anything. (It will, however, flag it as an error, since "id" isn't defined in this example.)
Now there's another feature of Eclipse's implementation: pressing Control-Space anywhere a Java identifier can go will bring up a list of identifiers that can fit there. (This includes things like in doc comments.) So if you don't want to type out "ExcessivelyLongInterfaceNameInterface," you can just type "E" and hit Control-Space, and up will pop a list of everything that starts with "E." However, it will NEVER replace what you're typing, until you press enter. Continuing to type will further refine the list, so if you type "x" after popping on the list above, it'll further refine the list to things that begin with "Ex."
This gives you all the power of Microsoft's IntelliSense (something I missed when going from Visual J++ to Java 1.2 all those years ago), but causes none of the "don't do that for me" problems the author of the article was complaining about.
I don't think his complaint was the concept of code assistance, it was Microsoft's implementation.
Indeed it does! (Score:5, Funny)
Nonsense, it's just another tool! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense, it's just another tool! (Score:3, Insightful)
Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can say: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can sa (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can sa (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can sa (Score:5, Insightful)
IDEs can definitely help you understand the code faster, however. Take Eclipse, for example:
Granted, I could understand the code without an IDE, but it's going to take me longer. I don't know if you were being sarcastic (I'm a little tired, so not so mentally keen), but people who use IDEs should not be written off as the equivalent of assembly line operators...
- shadowmatter
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.
Disconnected from the environment (Score:5, Interesting)
So... yeah I can see where programmer's eye-candy would be a major distraction for a programmer just getting started. But "back in the day" useful code could be written in Basic and C... wasn't complex or beautiful but served some purpose. In today's visual environments, it's not too hard to imagine kids getting REALLY bored with making meaningless code that doesn't look like the apps they are accustomed to running... but it's that meaningless code that really drives apps right?
Maybe I'm missing something important (and I probably am) but my initial impressions of graphical RAD tools are that it's a lot of flash and bluster but doesn't inspire a coder to write code.
Re:Disconnected from the environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you freak out with something like (e.g.) a Pentium II that converts all the CISC instructions to RISC microcode internally without being able to see it? Just curious...
Absolutely Not (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess I'm one of those uncool geeks who actually likes Visual Studio. I use it 10 hours/day and it certainly makes me more productive at my job.
It's also worth noting that VS doesn't FORCE you to do anything. There's always "Win32 console project" if you want to code like that.
For those of us who don't care (Score:5, Informative)
Death to Code Generation (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that there are two sorts: the kind you never edit and the kind you have to edit. I love compilers, as they generate machine code so well that you never should have to look at it. But programs that generate source code or, even worse, documentation, are things I revile. They let an amateur get quick results, but at a drastic reduction in long-term maintainability. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
What about Eclipse? (Score:5, 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.
Assuming that you code alone... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just finished a project where a co-worker of mine worked on the business logic objects for a system and I did the presentation and screen flow. Yeah, I could've fished through his JavaDocs and designs. That would have added 10-30 minutes everytime I had to figure out a new call to one of his libraries. Instead, I could hit "." in Eclipse, pull up the methods and select the one that I needed. In the future, other folks on my team will need to support that code. Being able to receive documentation from within the editor will make their jobs much easier.
It's interesting that the project that author most enjoyed was a C program he wrote for his own amusement. Unfortunately, most of the coding folks do for money involves working with others. While working individually on a project is more fun, being able to do so is typically a luxury.
Hypercard vs. Visual Studio (Score:3, Interesting)
Hypercard had some serious limitations (no data structures, monochrome, single-user applications, sometimes slow on machines under 50 MHz, etc.), but it had a very nice approach to both constructing UI-intensive applications and an extremely fast edit-run-debug cycle.
Visual Studio = Vendor Lock in (Score:3, Insightful)
When you switch from VS to GCC you suddenly find many things you had taken for granted aren't there. Hey, where's the RAD? How do I do this? Why don't my #import's work? What's with those unresolved links?
Etc. etc. etc.
The great thing with open source libraries like wxWidgets (which is very similar to MFC, by the way) is that you know what you're linking to and how they work.
So the key word in here is "transparency".
Re:Visual Studio = Vendor Lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
I fail to see how providing RAD tools in VS is somehow a shortcoming. Isn't that like saying you should rip most of the features out of Emacs because when you have to use another editor they won't be there anymore?
Anyone who switches from VC to GCC and expects #import to work has bigger problems to worry about. Being a muppet, for one.
Finish the fucking story (Score:3, Funny)
I really wanted to hear the end of this...
Read the footnotes... (Score:3, Interesting)
1It was the late 70s. I was working for New York Life Insurance Company at 51 Madison Avenue, programming in PL/I on an IBM 370 via TSO (Time Sharing Option) and an IBM 3278 terminal. I was using a new-fangled "full-screen editor" called FSE to edit my source code. At one point I pressed the Backspace key and instead of the cursor moving backwards as is normal, the entire screen moved left one character, including the frame of the editor, with the begin
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some background first: I dropped out of University for two reasons, first I wasn't sure if I wanted to focus on software development or network administration and I wanted some industry experience. Second, there were far too many people there who could memorize textbooks and regurgitate the examples, and hence go exceedingly well in examinations which seemed to only test this attribute; yet who could not understand yet explain the concepts being "taught".
That group I labelled, through its abundance of occurrances, the Visual Basic programmers. Using the term "programmers" loosely, of course. They could paint applications really well (drag & drop little GUI shit around in Visual Studio and come up with something tangible) but you didn't even have to take them outside of Visual Studio for them to be well out of their depth (which they obviously are when you do). Just ask them to explain what any of the Visual Studio-generated code does. They have no freaking idea what their code does, they just know if they drag this here and drop that there and click here and type that, that they get foo.
Now, in a culture when IT professionals are treated less than dirt, particularly by those in management, the focus is on generating Maggi programs. You know, the classic 2-minute noodles. Tangible results ASAP, don't care that the weird geeky stuff looks like spaghetti and the cook can't tell you what its made of because they simply don't know. All they had to do was drag some shit out of a package and drop it into a saucepan and stir for a little bit.
Nobody denies that Visual Studio has features that are useful. What is under scrutiny here is the fact that it also has features, and there's some crossover, that enable complete dimwits to produce the kind of results management is looking for in the time they are looking for, leaving those who can actually design and develop software looking incompetent. The PHB doesn't care that the real hacker's design is far superior and the implementation robust, it took 4 weeks longer (because they understood the entire problem and handled all the cases) and dammit the client wants it NOW, who cares that its crap - that's just a small detail that can be fixed later - potentially for more money. This then forms a culture that a particular breed of "programmer" - namely those that can only use Microsoft tools and work solely on the Microsoft platform - are better and that Microsoft solutions are better; not because they are but simply because more quality people and alternative solutions are shut down before their full benefits are realised, because of the impetus on getting a quick buck and must have things NOW.
I work with someone who only last week could not comprehend exactly how they were going to go about doing a particular job as Visual Studio was not installed on the server. The job involved editing some XML config files and doing some minor Python programming. Visual Studio by default has absolutely zero Python support (Activestate and presumably others have $$$ plugins for it, but that's not the point). That particular sentiment came the day after I installed Vim (with the Cream suite - I do that on Windoze boxes to stop Windoze gumbies whining about the default keybindings - another symptom of "cannot cope outside the box") while they watched on, and we did some of the work together. The whole "outside the box" thing annoys me because this VB programmer culture festers this idea that those who do it the Microsoft Way are somehow immune to the requirement to be flexible. Case in point, there's no requirement for them to "put up with" using something other than Visual Studio - yet you take someone with Unix experience and the onus *is* on them to adapt. I know its because Unix people are far more flexible and generally smarter and more capable, but in reality it translates to our skills being taken for granted
As opposed to Qt Designer? Or other tools? (Score:4, Insightful)
Overgeneralization (Score:5, Funny)
It's not the size of the tool... (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, perhaps I might agree that people who are learning how to code, should probably do so with as little assistance from the tool as possible.
This is the same thing I would say about kids learning math. Using calculators rots the brain, don't you think?
Not my experience. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't program in anything else anymore, unless I have to!
The Mac tools are especially horrible. All XCODE is, is a poorly integrated GUI slapped on top of GNU tools. And heaven help you if one of your binary "NIB" files gets corrupted. You're SOL.
You've got it backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
Does Visual Studio rot the brain, or is Visual Studio designed for less l337 programmers? (I don't want to say that it's for rotten brains
Microsoft's strategy is to provide easy to use development tools (ex VisualBasic) and innondate the world with cheap MCSE's trained in 6 month courses to use them. Microsoft can then go to PHBs and tell them their solutions don't require them to hire expensive developers, just these cheaper code monkey MCSE's. I'm not saying all or even most MCSE's are idiots, but from what I read this is a major part of Microsoft's sales pitch.
This seems to go hand in hand with one of the submitter's conclusions, which is that these tools promote or even enforce rapid application development at the expense of robust maintainable applications.
Counterpoints (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, any code editor is a tool. In the end, they are a fancy way to create text files to compile into binary. There are people who use VS to write code without understanding what it's doing behind the scenes, just like there are people who drive without knowing how an internal combustion engine works.
Finally, there are people who hand-write all their code, waste alot of time, and still write bad code.
oh so now they see it? (Score:3, Insightful)
With technologies like "Intellisense" (or the EMACS scratch buffer, or your other local system equivilent- no it wasn't invented here fanboys), you don't have to.
In contrast, POSIX has relatively few APIs layered underneither relatively few more. Across all the "common" APIs you'll find on a modern Linux system, you'll probably find just about as many as you'll find on Windows.
However, you'll note that many POSIX programmers refuse to use things like Intellisense (or whathaveyou) for these purposes- not just because they rot the brain (that's something we find out the hard way as well) but because it simply isn't necessary(!)
I'm almost positive GNOME offers perfectly usable functions somewhere that allow me to put up struts, but I have never used them. Oh I think I went looking for them once, but I didn't look long because once I found GDK_WINDOW_XID() I was back in X11 land.
Because my knowledge is layered as well, this means that building my application for a platform or environment I don't normally target means that I don't have to learn everything at once. I'm happy to use the normal file I/O operations I use everywhere when I cannot quite figure out the glib way to do it, and so it is I should!
The win32 development model doesn't make this so easy- APIs are all at the same level (do I want GetDriveType or SetupDlGetDeviceRegistryProperty?), change meaning (e.g. MoveFile working differently on WinME and Win2K), and sometimes completely defying documentation (SqlDataReader.GetChar?) and so on. Worse still, by making all API available equally how is the programmer to function?
As a result, methodologies that I have used for several decades now are completely inappropriate- I may be able to write a ActiveX control in C, but I certainly would never want to! Not only will Windows dictate your resource files, dialog boxes, and programming structure, but it'll also dictate your programming language as well!
Enough is enough!
There are plenty of tasks that are a pleasure to code in perl. Others that Objective-C makes for more fun. Still others I might find a use for Java or even C#, and yet I haven't found any on their own merits that would demand C++ other than the IMAPI* family of interfaces is grossly inaccessible to any other language.
The consequences are that I keep win32 development to the bare minimum and do not accept any win32 development jobs- and the result? I'm writing more code than I ever did before.
I'd like to ask anyone who actually enjoys writing software on Windows to tell me their secret. The development tools are lacking, and the APIs are daunting. I dare say the Win32 development environment is the absolute worst ever, so I tenatively question anyone who says otherwise: Have you ever used anything else? (Seriously. Take 30 minutes and write kiosk software in Objective-C and XCode. Take another 30 to see how good ol' GNUMakefiles can improve your life. It's absolutely amazing Win32 developers that see my methods to understand that they can work on sources instead of processes)
It's not the tool, (Score:3, Interesting)
organization. This is why large programs often fail or are
terribly bug-ridden. The complexity of software grows much
more than linearly with the number of lines of code. VS.NET
is an excellent tool for program editing, but it has its
limits as to the number of files (and, hence, data structures)
that it can present coherently to the user.
The challenge for programmers is always how much of the
design can be visualized in the brain. As much as I like
VS.NET, it does not allow me in any way to visually represent
my internal organization of my software, therefore my brain
is the limiting factor. (AAA, Visio sux and I don't have
the cash for Canvas X).
But, hey, what do you think I do on my machine, other than
read slashdot
engineers who create our own tools, so stop complaining, and
get to coding!
Peace & Blessings,
bmac
Evolution of Development (Score:5, Interesting)
Visual Basic back in 1992 was in of itself a massive advance for this type of programming and programming understanding. Look at all the 1000s of VB applications from this time period by people that truly had very little coding experience.
However, some of the VB programs from this time were quite effective.
I think the biggest injustice to programming and the programming community as a whole, is the lack of UI guidelines, and understanding usability and User Interaction and User Flow.
How many times have you grabbed a GOOD program, with brillant LOW LEVEL coded features, but the interface to the application work about as well as a broken pay phone.
So sure VS can remove the user from 'low level coding', but this is NOT always a bad thing.
As development EVOLVES, there is NO REASON with the AI in the development tools and the AI in the code produced by these development tools should not be used. Why should a person in the 21st century truly have to fully understand memory allocation, advanced recursion, or even see program past advanced event handlers, as that is what programs ARE - event handlers...
Why do we have to beat down development tools just because they remove the developer from having to DO THINGS THE Tool or Compiler should DO FOR YOU? This is what makes advanced devleopment and the progression of better applications bloom.
Go back to the VB of 1992, it was a major eplosion for application availability. Sure some of the programs were crap and from people that had no idea of coding, but there were also serious developers that didn't want to take time to screw with all the crap that a developer in THIS DAY and AGE should not have to do.
I welcome development tools advancement. Sure there is some fundamental coding knowledge that everyone should know, but you can't blame these tools for this.
I could have the same arguments about many projects in the Open Source world, they are brilliant, but since the coders have little undertsanding of usability or UI guidelines, they applications are virtually worthless to anyone that is not a geek.
I'm not even arguing VS is the best set of tools out there, Borland still makes some really great development environments. I still like Delphi, and am amazed of how tight the code it produces, and yet how much it DOES FOR ME, even if I do know how to do the things it is doing for me is irrelevant.
We not only need to support development that is beyond a text editor and command line compiler, but we also need to support development tools that try to structure and help users with usability for the people that will be using the applications. PERIOD.
VS and Borland products are pretty good, but they could even be better - imagine a development environment that gives a flag when it notices a break in usability, or gives a compile warning after it 'intellectually' sees the appliction has many inconsistencies that would confuse the user.
Additionally, VS is even dated for what the new Microsoft Development and technologies are introducing. VS2005 barely touches the abilities of future Windows development - that is why the 'Expression' like of products will be used to augment the UI and User experiene for VS applications.
Give the world a couple of years, and the foundations of 'native' understanding being built into the next generation of Windows Vista, WILL change not only the user experience, but the development world. Leapfrogging concepts of today.
Go look up some of the concepts Microsoft has introduced and HAS that are often overlooked, go do a search on the last PDC. There are things in Vista that move development to a new level of understanding and functionality for not only developers, but what the users will start to see in the next 5 years.
It is like one of the brains behind the XAML and XPS systems in
Anything can rot your brain if you let it (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see how you could say that about VS, but I think it applies to a lot of things. If you don't know (or want to know) anything about how computers work, then you could get lulled into just clicking the pretty widgets and filling in the blanks on all the things the wizard does for you. Myself, I use VS but almost always start with a blank project and build from there. When I was first learning in the mid 90s, I got roped into using MFC because of it, but experience has taught me to avoid proprietary stuff like that--and by "proprietary" I mean "specific to a particular system". You could make the same argument against using shell scripts with calls to commands found only on your favorite distro of Linux. If you aren't aware of the existance of a "Linux standards base" or "C99" you are going to get suckered into writing something "trendy" when you didn't mean to. Then you'll find yourself re-writing it 2 years later when the "release often" cycle has made your efforts irrelevant; but I don't hear anybody saying Open Source rots your brain. You have to learn to defend your brain. Defend it against tools that hide too much, defend it against trendiness, defend it against outdated designs touted as the latest thing, defend against marketing, and hold on to what stands the test of time. If you have a good brain, a bad tool might keep you down for a while, but you'll learn, and you can actually "un-rot" your brain.
Rot the brain? (Score:5, Funny)
In either case, something drastic is going to happen. Tread lightly.
gcc and bash and Vim rot your brain (Score:3, Insightful)
But I just have a hard time actually accomplishing useful programming in an IDE enviroment. Delphi was an exception to that. I got a student version of Visual Studio.NET my first year of graduate school, but I just got too frustrated trying to actually do any programming in it. When I discovered MinGW and the ability to create Windows native programs with gcc, I completely ditched trying to use Visual Studio at all. My brain has been rotted, I have been spoiled and I can't deal with the horrible complexities of trying to get an IDE to do what I want.
I can build my makefiles up from just a couple lines like "all: gcc file.cpp" to 20 or 30 lines as my project grows. Have you ever tried to edit the project files, or move a manually built project into Visual Studio? Trying to create the necessary files manually is pretty much impossible, and I don't think it's even possible to import projects whose makefiles were created by autoconfig/automake.
As long as everything works in your IDE, it's fine, they're usable, but when you try to do something outside the boundries of "common and expected tasks", well, give me a brain rotting command line any day...
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...
Windows a la Unix (Score:4, Interesting)
1) I worked in a shop that did cross-platform development with core libraries that had to compile and run across various Unices and also Windows (95 and NT 4.0 at the time).
2) someone turned me on to Petzold as the best place to start.
Petzold's uncompromising focus on the code and away from the tools (like VS) allowed me to get used to doing things the "hard" way---rolling my own message handlers, hand-editing
Unfortunately, the advent of COM/COM+/DCOM prevented this approach from working for too long. For instance, magical precompilers that generate binary files that must be linked into your project to make it "just work"---I'm looking at you, "tlb."
Wait just a cotton pickin minute......... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, people who do that (code in lower level languages) build their own "RAD" system with their own code snippets as they build their tool box over time. And in that system EVERYONE has a different hammer, different screw driver and diferent voltage meter and none of the damn things work alike.
All this guy said in so many words was that he dosn't like the way M$ did it.
I do agree that VS's habit of saying hands off this code is beyond fucking annoying and borders on down right criminal. That being said I have found no examples of a bar across my path when I want to do something down dirty and hands on. The system is just not set up to do it so it is even more cumbersome than it would be otherwise to get at the gutz. The IDE is what has problems with messing with the designer code... if you don't use the designer and edit your code elsewhere and link it yourself (something he admits elsewhere is possible) then this is no longer a problem. He praises using his own choice of editors in one situation and then in a backhand way is annoyed that the VS environment dosn't provide what he wants. Fine, use something else if you have a problem with it.
The reality is that modern systems and modern graphical environments have a shitload of dumb overhead programming to be done to handle the stupid ass forms. No matter how you simplify the refferencing system someone is going to complain that if you don't do it all yourself you don't udnerstand what is going on. If you want to redefine forms more power to you. But the power of computing is that once YOU do it that means eveyrone else can easily benifit from it and they do not have to repeat your work. All VS does is leverage all the work done through the years on windows forms in an easy to access and implement manner. It is a GOOD thing that you can punch out a program in a week now that would have taken months if you had to manually handle all the form operations. Remember... all code generated by someone else is like other drivers on the road... if they are going faster they are idiots and if they are slower they are numb nutz. Just think of the generated code as another memeber of the coding team and get over it. You just can't do it all yourself. If it is truly atrocious enough to change then make the effort, else shut up and get on with it.
There is and always will be a time to go back to the drawing board. At others you reap the benifits of what has come before and enjoy the fact that what once was hard and the domain of the few is now easy and achievable by all. VS is fantastic at bringing application development to the masses. It accomplishes its goal. If that goal isn't what you want then damnit don't use it or figure out a way to adapt it to your purposes. But for crying out loud would eveyone stop bitchign that the thing is not all things to all people.