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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com

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

#81

Post by rbanffy »

krapp wrote: post #77
blobs wrote: post #63

> I’m prevented from ever achieving a fluid coding style because the coding is not coming entirely from my head. My coding has become a constant dialog with IntelliSense. This. Code should live in your head. You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object. I hate code completion, most of the time it gets in the way of your thought process. Even if it can gain you a little speed incre…

>I wrote many bug free codebases with it, that's my experience. Prove it. You seem to be claiming to be qualitatively superior to most developers, since most developers use an IDE or tool of some sort, so let's see an example of this nontrivial bug free code you've written.

That's as easy to prove as that there isn't an invisible, indetectable pink unicorn standing right behind you as you read this.

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

#82

Post by non-entity »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #59
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.

Hoesntly the one thing that's always turned me off of WPF was how had styling was. iirc, doing minor style modifications on a simple Uai involved writing a boatload of markup and overriding stuff I didnt want to have to worry about

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

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

dleslie wrote: post #42
apetresc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You definitely don't need to go to a full IDE just to get find-definition and find-references. Those are basic features of any ctags-enabled editor, and nowadays with the momentum behind LSPs you get carrier-grade versions of it without even needing to generate a tag file. (In fact, Neovim's next version will actually ship with an LSP client, you won't even need an extension for it). I just bind 'gd' and 'gr' to go t…

Emacs has dumb-jump, which is just... Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. It doesn't perform any deep semantic analysis; it just abuses whatever existing grep-like tools you have and a bare minimum understanding of the language syntax to find likely correct definitions. https://github.com/jacktasia/dumb-jump

Holy hell, it's the missing companion for Hippie Expand! For non-emacsers, hippie-expand completes the word you're typing by throwing a bunch of heuristics at it, most notable of which is "search this and every other opened buffer for the last few things before the cursor, and see if this produces a completion".

(A funny side effect of this heuristic is that it essentially behaves like a Markov chain. If you have it bound to a key, say M-/, then you can type a starting word and repeatedly press "M-/ Space", and it'll start generating text based on what you have in your open buffers.)

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HippieExpand

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

#84

Post by danielbarla »

stinos wrote: post #64
blobs wrote: post #63

> I’m prevented from ever achieving a fluid coding style because the coding is not coming entirely from my head. My coding has become a constant dialog with IntelliSense. This. Code should live in your head. You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object. I hate code completion, most of the time it gets in the way of your thought process. Even if it can gain you a little speed incre…

You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object. 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…

Clearly, you just memorise / know everything. Jokes aside, there is a balance to be had between having to look up trivial, everyday things via intellisense, and expecting people to know every single method on a massive set of libraries. I'm always surprised by people who claim that the latter approach is a good investment of their time and mental capacity. At some scale, it simply cannot be optimal.

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

#85

Post by krapp »

rbanffy wrote: post #81
krapp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wrote many bug free codebases with it, that's my experience. Prove it. You seem to be claiming to be qualitatively superior to most developers, since most developers use an IDE or tool of some sort, so let's see an example of this nontrivial bug free code you've written.

That's as easy to prove as that there isn't an invisible, indetectable pink unicorn standing right behind you as you read this.

I'm as confident that there isn't an invisible, indetectable pink unicorn standing behind me as I am that someone has written multiple complex and bug-free applications working only from their memory of a language and codebase. Not even Don Knuth is that much of a savant.

At the very least, the quality of such code should be self-evident and instructive.

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

#86

Post by raxxorrax »

blobs wrote: post #63

> I’m prevented from ever achieving a fluid coding style because the coding is not coming entirely from my head. My coding has become a constant dialog with IntelliSense. This. Code should live in your head. You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object. I hate code completion, most of the time it gets in the way of your thought process. Even if it can gain you a little speed incre…

I think if I want to solve a problem, intellisense already became a requirement for me, since it does increase speed and I would say that this helps "fluidity".

I see some other side effects though and that regards labeling. I spend much less time on thinking about fitting ones since they would be auto-completed on later use anyway. If I don't have intellisense available I spend more time on thinking about names just because I need to remember them. That makes the code much more readable in some cases.

Exploring APIs can be much more enjoyable if you have it and there is no thorough documentation available on the other hand.

Still, some projects have a lot of constants and variables, so in that case it really helps.

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

#87

Post by vsareto »

danielbarla wrote: post #84
stinos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object. 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…

Clearly, you just memorise / know everything. Jokes aside, there is a balance to be had between having to look up trivial, everyday things via intellisense, and expecting people to know every single method on a massive set of libraries. I'm always surprised by people who claim that the latter approach is a good investment of their time and mental capacity. At some scale, it simply cannot be optimal.

>At some scale, it simply cannot be optimal.

Time spent memorizing APIs is time that could be spent learning new problem solving techniques or interesting algorithms.

These folks have bad opportunity cost assessments. There's always some piece of knowledge more useful for memorization than an API function.

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

#89

Post by rafaelvasco »

On the contrary. For me, good intellisense just makes coding flow better. If you're just getting your feet wet with the API, auto complete greatly helps you discovering the API. If you're already a veteran, coding just flows at lightning speed as long as intellisense correctly predicts what you want, which is the case "most" of the time.

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

#90

Post by pure-awesome »

anthk wrote: post #61
GuiA wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Reaching the top of the knowledge pyramid in your subfield over time has remained constant (typically in your early to mid 20s, as you complete your PhD). We have more sub fields, but that’s not particularly a problem - once you’re an effective researcher, jumping branches - and even trunks - is far from impossible. A few months surrounded with talented people and dedication is typically enough - eg my grad schoo…

>See also the recent rise of machine learning - many of the top contributors to that field were not doing machine learning research 10 years ago. Machine learning is older than you think.

The previous commenter was not saying that machine learning didn't exist 10 years ago. They were saying that "many of the TOP CONTRIBUTORS TO THAT FIELD were not doing machine learning research 10 years ago."

There are also people who were doing machine learning 30 years ago and are still doing so. But there are people who were doing, say, fluid dynamics simulations 10 years ago who self-taught machine learning, and are now making significant contributions to machine learning, by transferring their knowledge of programming, optimization, calculus, etc.

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