Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

> And I sincerely hope that in five or ten years from now, we’re not still watching reruns of Friends.

I have bad news for Charles.

I also wish to locate this video or maybe the speech text. Really interested in early history of MS

> You must define all variables before you use them. No more skipping around in your code.

I skip around all over the place, but I almost always throw in a definition for a variable at the point where I first decide to use it. Maybe that's why Intellisense never annoyed me.

As for the question of whether power tools like Intellisense rot the mind: No. What rots the mind is staying within your comfort zone instead of trying new things and challenging your capabilities. Power tools just let you tackle bigger challenges faster.

> In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If that’s not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what you’re typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong.

Maybe I'm spoiled by Resharper and similar, but I feel like this statement is wrong now, given the buttons for "generate property", "generate class", "generate method", etc. I often just start using a variable and then click generate to make it exist.

Especially in the C++ world where it means editing a header file, rewriting the type, duplicating the function prototype, etc this is a big time saver.

Anecdote from this week: I've been working on a Python project that uses several classes and subclasses, with code paths that move around a lot through the class hierarchy. I was trying to add some functionality but kept getting bogged down trying to make sure all the subclasses implement the same interface, using Atom as the text editor.

Then I installed PyCharm and completed the task in just a few hours thanks to the "find uses" and jump to definition functionality. I was also able to refactor some less-than-good variables names. I've always hated IDEs for personal projects (to avoid mind-rot), but now I'm starting to think for large enough projects you just need an IDE.

The only drawback I see is a few millisecond lag on all actions. Every time you scroll, or clock on something there is a lot of things going on in the background, vs. Atom which feels near-instant.