Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005) • Hacker News Board

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#51

Post by fergie » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:05 AM UTC

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #31

Barrin92 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a very loyal long term emacs user I have to agree. I find myself using vscode more and more just to how more pleasant refactoring and debugging python code is.

I almost switched to VSCode for JavaScript but I’ve found that tide-mode (for JavaScript) and lsp-mode (for other languages) have really closed the gap. (If you turn off lsp-sideline-mode)

I dallied with VSCode when work forced me to deal with a gigantic lump of Typescripted React, but in the end I found that emacs with tide/prettier was a nicer experience, so I ended up going back, as I always do, to emacs.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#52

Post by nsomaru » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:24 AM UTC

Rainymood wrote: post #50

I started on Vim, then moved to Spacemacs, then Emacs with Vim bindings, now on VScode with Vim bindings... honestly, a good IDE does a lot of things for developer productivity. We have to remember that, while we are defined by our tools, we are all still building the same thing: code. What your employer/boss/client cares about is /what/ code you produce and what business value it generates. They don't really care ab…

I eventually moved away from vscode vim to nvim + lsp because the bindings weren’t good enough.

Small things added up enough to just jar me enough that it wasn’t worth it. Maybe I’ll jump in there again when I need to refactor something in a big way but for me nvim+plugins are where it’s at.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#53

Post by helsinkiandrew » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

This kind of mind rotting is everywhere - lists for a few shopping items, using GPS for a simple route you should be able to remember after looking at a map, reminders for important dates, using a calculator for a simple sum.

I'm sure humanities over reliance on mental aids will increase Alzheimers like mental deficiencies as we age.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#54

Post by mpfundstein » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

Rainymood wrote: post #50

I started on Vim, then moved to Spacemacs, then Emacs with Vim bindings, now on VScode with Vim bindings... honestly, a good IDE does a lot of things for developer productivity. We have to remember that, while we are defined by our tools, we are all still building the same thing: code. What your employer/boss/client cares about is /what/ code you produce and what business value it generates. They don't really care ab…

Why not just use vim with a proper setup? If you are proficient with the bindings and modal workflow, I don't really see a reason to use those bloated alternatives that not even run in the terminal... Everytime i try something else i wander eventually back to my little vim setup :-)q

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#55

Post by retsibsi » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

charlieflowers wrote: post #47

muststopmyths wrote: post #10

Petzold's books on Windows GUI programming were pretty much the Bibles if you wanted to understand how stuff worked under the covers of Visual Studio's designers/codegen. Great author from the perspective of someone how needs to know the innards, not just churn out code.

His book "Code" is an amazing exploration of how computers work. One of the best books I've ever read.

Seconded. He did an amazing job of combining accessibility and depth. The book opens with, iirc, the scenario of two neighbouring kids who want to communicate with each other from a distance -- how can they encode and transmit their messages? And it builds gradually and logically from there to an explanation of how the incredibly complex behaviour of computers can arise from truly simple building blocks.

(Another approach to the same topic, and also excellent, is Nisan and Shocken's The Elements of Computing Systems. That was the first one to properly demystify computers for me -- until then, they were basically magic. I imagine Code would have done the same if I'd read it first.)

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#56

Post by retsibsi » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #34

> I don’t know what rule you go by, but for me it’s always been simple: “Three or more: Use a for.” This is why we have loops. This is why we are programmers Walking away from stage, he probably thought “I should have said, ‘programmers count 1, 2, 3, for ’”

L'esprit d'escalier by proxy, 15 years after the fact... I like it :)

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#57

Post by moomin » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

I think the thing with this article is that it was right, but also that Microsoft finally accepted it was right. There’s no fixing WinForms, but more modern Microsoft technologies no longer work “designer first”. My VS plus Resharper can happily be used to develop from top-down or middle-out.

Basically, VS didn’t make programmers dumber, but it definitely made their code worse. And Microsoft eventually started paying attention to the people who were telling them that (probably because some of them were also saying they were switching to Java).

And no, I’m not smarter in environments where I don’t have IntelliSense. I just have more tabs open.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#58

Post by retsibsi » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:54 AM UTC

jstewartmobile wrote: post #12

Charles wrote probably one of the best explain-the-computer-to-grandma books ever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden_Language_of_C...

One reason it's so good is that while it would (I think) work for the stereotypical grandma or curious youngster, it's also really interesting for readers who aren't complete novices. It assumes no pre-existing knowledge, and it starts quite slowly, but by the end I reckon anyone who isn't a CS grad will have deepened or solidified their understanding.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#59

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

MarkSweep wrote: post #44

While some of his complaints now have solutions[1], when WPF (previously known as Avalon) is used with care, the resulting XAML is much more diff-able and code-review-able. The CodeDOM serialization method is dense and small changes can cause huge code diffs. On the other hand, WPF is a lot more complex than WinForms. There are a lot of different ways to use, many of which involve data binding that is not evaluated t…

Every couple of years I take another look at WPF but it always feels like wading through treacle for me. I'm so much more productive in WinForms. Perhaps if I dedicated a year to it I might come out the other side a productive WPF programmer but I have my doubts.

Re: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

#60

Post by patrickvmm » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

I've also noticed how intellisense affects design. It dictates bottum-up design and shapes your thoughts. You don't memorize what's in your classes anymore but get lazy and press . and scroll through the properties.

New vs versions allow to disable the auto popup and allow to only display intellisense when called through C-Space. I've been using that and found that it improved my reasoning.