11–20 of 79 posts
I sure didn't in 2001. The author is an idiot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many I'm curious why you think it would be important or valuable for a VS developer to write makefiles. Your subsequent statements seem to indicate that you believe it allowed MS to put more project complexity, hidden by the IDE. I don't particularly see anything wrong with that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. My view on this is: I write code to creat…
You write code to make sellable products and every avoidable complexity, every thing you don't understand in your code or build system will eventually come back as increased cost when you need to extend, adapt it to the next Microsoft OS or simply debug it in an environment that looks like what your clients use. Of you don't understand your build system, you really don't know what you are shippin.
VS provides the ability to do all of those things. You can both extend the IDE and create DSLs. And .NET runs on a VM, so it's write-once, run-everywhere (unless you're trying to port to Mono/Linux, but that's not what .NET is designed for). It also has the absolute best debugging toolkit of any IDE, ever.
Make files are for the people deep down in the guts of systems, writing bare-metal code. This isn't 1990, we don't to force ourselves to use these antiquated tools for all sides of development.
The idea that you need to "understand your build system" is particularly ridiculous. I understand that my code compiles, has no warnings from VS, passes all my test cases, and works fine in beta testing. Why do I need to write a make file to do what VS is smart enough to do automatically?
It is an arsurd article. I can point you to web devs on LAMP from the same era that were equally ignorant of other languages or paradigms. The real question for developers isn't, "what things, do I consider important, do you know?", but rather "what have you shipped?" If the only language you know is C++, but you're the lead dev for the Halo series, that gives me a lot more respect than if you know 20 languages and y…
I am not sure I can agree with the article. By hiding so many aspects of what a program is made of, Microsoft did a disservice to C programmers. Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many and, by hiding the gory details inside an IDE, Microsoft created - and enjoyed - a good excuse for, if not creating gory details, at least allowing them to exist and thrive. The recent "embrace" of functional p…
That's a good thing, to be honest. One person fewer who needs to worry about stupid semantic differences between tabs and spaces is one person happier.
I am not sure I can agree with the article. By hiding so many aspects of what a program is made of, Microsoft did a disservice to C programmers. Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many and, by hiding the gory details inside an IDE, Microsoft created - and enjoyed - a good excuse for, if not creating gory details, at least allowing them to exist and thrive. The recent "embrace" of functional p…
The second and main point is that since this large programmer population receives its knowledge almost exclusively from MS, it's a really good thing that MS have started teaching functional programming. It's probably the best chance FP has ever had to break into the mainstream. Even if it takes over just a corner of the MS world, that corner is probably larger than the rest of FP put together. This is a really good thing, and it massively kicks the ass of the crap that MS used to feed their "Elvises" and probably still do.
I'll add a third point. We know why this is happening. It's because a little less than 15 years ago, MS changed their direction, acquired some top-notch people (starting with Hejlsberg), and started moving in a direction more informed by CS and PL theory. This process is slow, but good. One can finally see it yield real fruit in the form of F# and the recent enhancements to C#. People like Meijer are having a very real influence. Come to think of it, that's probably why people like Meijer went to MS to begin with.
It is an arsurd article. I can point you to web devs on LAMP from the same era that were equally ignorant of other languages or paradigms. The real question for developers isn't, "what things, do I consider important, do you know?", but rather "what have you shipped?" If the only language you know is C++, but you're the lead dev for the Halo series, that gives me a lot more respect than if you know 20 languages and y…
Somebody knowing 20 languages does not necessarily make a good employee. What the enterprise wants is exactly what VS has been giving them for the past years.
Sure, as the enterprise is escaping IBM-isation of the workforce you can see a bit of a shift in perspective (evidenced by changes in VS), but nothing so drastic as to actually decrease "productivity".
The point here is that the article has the wrong name, the title should be "How enterprise lives with the programming world".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write code to make sellable products and every avoidable complexity, every thing you don't understand in your code or build system will eventually come back as increased cost when you need to extend, adapt it to the next Microsoft OS or simply debug it in an environment that looks like what your clients use. Of you don't understand your build system, you really don't know what you are shippin.
Have you ever use Visual Studio or written a production app in C#? VS provides the ability to do all of those things. You can both extend the IDE and create DSLs. And .NET runs on a VM, so it's write-once, run-everywhere (unless you're trying to port to Mono/Linux, but that's not what .NET is designed for). It also has the absolute best debugging toolkit of any IDE, ever. Make files are for the people deep down in th…
As for this not being 1990 (or 1980, BTW), I agree. One should not use antiquated tools to do a job, but I find your willingness not to understand what you are doing quite amusing. If I cared, I would find it distressing, but, since I don't, I will leave it as it is.
I'm a pretty well-rounded developer, but I know there are innumerable things that I don't know. I also know that I research enough that the things I'm not comfortable with aren't particularly important for me or my projects.
I've never developed anything real in a functional language, for instance, aside from doing some tutorial tests and realizing that the friction (with coworkers trying to maintain, for instance) overwhelmingly demolished any potential advantage.
I will say one thing though -- the most mediocre developers I've ever worked with tended to have the widest "range" of "skills".
It's a way to compensate for never being able to provide solutions. Instead they always weaved, always sure that if you just embraced the latest thing and did things entirely differently it would be so much better (which they never actually do themselves because their role is more "OMG, you don't know about {X}? OMG!")
I am not sure I can agree with the article. By hiding so many aspects of what a program is made of, Microsoft did a disservice to C programmers. Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many and, by hiding the gory details inside an IDE, Microsoft created - and enjoyed - a good excuse for, if not creating gory details, at least allowing them to exist and thrive. The recent "embrace" of functional p…
Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many That's a good thing, to be honest. One person fewer who needs to worry about stupid semantic differences between tabs and spaces is one person happier.
I would find debugging makefiles... enjoyable compared to writing Windows C++ code.