Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

I also like the consistency of windows forms. This is awesome for administrative and business users, who just want to get their work done. There are no UI surprises. But your tool will look like an ugly duck, if it is used in an environment with shiny Web and WPF applications.

For this reason alone, we had to make a split between forms and WPF applications. Windows Forms for administrative UI, WPF for end users. (By the way: I recommend outsourcing the design part to another company specialized in WPF design. Designing nice WPF UI is a black art.)

There's also the fact that Microsoft calls forms legacy tech, but I'm not yet too concerned. I would be more concerned to rewrite all WPF application with the next shiny framework coming around...

So what do you do instead? Not just for intellisense but all other possible code completion solutions? Does that mean you always manually open a source file and look for the name of the function/member/whatever you need, then either copy/paste or manually type it? And try to remember all of them to avoid having to do that process again? I've done that from time to time and still do but it's just slower than intellisense and the likes, always.

I'm entirely split between vigorous agreement and shaking my head.

At some point I just lost interest in committing various interfaces to working memory. The more trivial the more virulent my disinterest. Web stuff, especially front end? Unless it's crucial UX for something Very Important, it's just not worth the effort. Bring on the program synthesizers, even if they're limited to tab completing. I would literally rather memorize gibberish. If I wanted to memorize things I don't actually need to, I would've gone to med school.

At the same time, for code that actually matters and requires deep thought, I type every character and think about each one a lot.

Hopefully at some point program synthesis will be good enough that we don't have to make this choice. In the meantime, pretty much everyone doing something other than code-for-the-sake-of-code is writing some software where understanding every character really matters and some software that just needs to do the dumb thing right more than half the time to be worth it.

> It automatically formats your code, so the codebase doesn't resemble the one in your head anymore.

Same thing. One the one hand, your coworkers are not your psychologists. On the other hand, who is going to explain the code if you can't? And again, the resolution is: does this code being correct really matter?

I think, this is simply not possible nowadays in any professional environment, involving multiple players.

There are way too many frameworks within which you have to find your way relatively quickly and nevertheless often only for a short time. Many with idiosyncrasies, sub-par design, the wrong smell or simply not satisfying the own taste one way or another.

With C++ almost my first language, I was using Qt for many years. It was almost the only framework fitting expectations more or less intuitively the whole time (at this moment, PyTorch fits a similar spot). This specific example hasn't to be true for everyone, of course. But there are always things on the other hand of the spectrum, for which I immediately forget syntactical peculiarities again and again. There seems some inner resistance, accelerating this for some software artefacts. I have seen this this seemingly feeble aesthetic point with many - often very good - programmers, maintaining a strong inner image of the software they are responsible for.