I think it is more than fine to use Edit and Continue as a professional. I’m acknowledging the trade offs and making an argument meant to be heard by a resistant audience that is likely to be the ones making the tool.
E&C is a useful tool, just like a debugger in general is a useful tool, despite early enthusiasm for unit testing having people claim you shouldn’t use debuggers anymore, but instead write unit tests to debug every issue. E&C can be misused. If i was using C# i would take generics over edit and continue if I could only have one, but I definitely prefer to have both.
The theory behind using personas is you get a better tool or solution by highly focusing on a concrete user rather than spread around a bunch of features across every possible customer. What i expressed is what is necessary to ‘get through’ to someone who hasn’t read a book like ‘the inmates are running the asylum’. That was true of many in Devdiv back at that time. UX is now recognized more firmly as a separable highly valued skill. If you read and understand the persona and still think ‘i’m a programmer, this is a dev tool, my opinion is more import than what the persona would want .. that is the audience for the above. I think that is what is present in the comment to which i was replying, so i was attempting to put it in those terms.
I do believe it is helpful to understand who a tool is designed for to see why it works as it does. Edit and continue when done well is incredibly ‘safe’. It does what you expect every single time, even if you don’t know how it is doing it.
A good example where there is a hard choice is changing a linq statement. To make E&C in a dev tool that holds true to ‘what is on the page is what runs’ you need to violate aspects of how deferred execution works. If the closure was already captured are all existing instances of them going back to the source as it is on the page now or the source as it was when when captured? I have a strong opinion that it should be the source on the page now to build a good E&C, but that choice is detrimental to learning what is happening with any type of deferred execution. The cost of implementation for my opinion is also probably two or more orders of magnitude in effort.
I also think ‘non-professionals’ should be able to program and get to something that works. Particularly in people who write developer tools the bigger chore is gaining empathy for people who deserve to program, but simply aren’t making infrastructure. My reply is counterproductive in trying to model proper empathy so thank you for calling that out.