Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 122 posts

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

#101

Post by kortex »

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…

> Code should live in your head. You shouldn't need intellisense to see that a property doesn't exist in an object.

That may be well and good for you, but not everyone's brain works like that. My brain is more GPU than CPU: I don't deal well with holding lots of disparate pieces of information in working memory, but I can quickly look at a problem and see many solutions as routes of data through black boxes, and determine what pipes need to plumb to where.

Why should I waste time and neural cycles on code "living" (e.g. interpreting state) in my head, when I have a perfectly good "head" for it right in front of me? Types? Linter? Formatting? That's wasted focus that could be going towards cybernetics, architecture, API ergonomics, and performance.

Before IDEs, I had a tight loop of write code, run it in repl, squash bugs, repeat. Productivity skyrocketed once I started using Spyder/codeblocks, then once again in Pycharm/Clion, and then once again when I started using type hints in python. I just started using TabNine and it's like finally I feel like my code can keep up with my brain.

Www.tabnine.com

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

#102

Post by tartoran »

GarvielLoken wrote: post #98
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #53

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.

Until the Butlerian Jihad my friend

Whats the Butlerian Jihad?

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

#103

Post by zelly »

thrower123 wrote: post #73
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think visual studio code strikes the right balance between performance and functionality

I don't understand why people like VS Code. Are they coming from Eclipse, or writing code in Notepad? It's light for an Electron app, but that still makes it a bloated pig compared to Sublime or Geany or any of the older Scintilla/SciTE editors. It can't do multi-window at all, which is a disqualifying mark in my books.

It is very well designed. Probably the most well designed editor/IDE ever created. (This is coming from a long-time Emacs enthusiast who still uses it most of the time.) Everything is modular and pluggable, like the extension system, tasks, the formatter, the debugger, language server. It offers a consistent API for any language or build system to tool against, so one improvement in the core editor can improve the experience of every language/build system.

It is heavy because it pulls in Chromium, but this is also one of its strengths. User extensions run on the same V8 that the entire editor does, so when you make an extension, it runs as fast as it would if it were part of the core editor. (This is a huge downside of Elisp's and Vim's interpreters.)

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

#104

Post by zelly »

IDEs are not going away. The next generation programming languages will have to be IDE-first. The syntax would have to be designed specifically to be amenable to autocompletion by ML language models.

One day code will not even be authored in a text format. It will be a binary format that is manipulated by some kind of visual graph editor. Who knows what it will look like. With brain-computer interfaces you may not even be typing or using your hands anymore.

Don't get married to plain text.

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

#105

Post by clownpenis_fart »

zelly wrote: post #104

IDEs are not going away. The next generation programming languages will have to be IDE-first. The syntax would have to be designed specifically to be amenable to autocompletion by ML language models. One day code will not even be authored in a text format. It will be a binary format that is manipulated by some kind of visual graph editor. Who knows what it will look like. With brain-computer interfaces you may not ev…

code is written once, modified 10 times, and read 100 times

coding productivity is absolutely not about how fast you type the text into the computer

it is very much about how readable the code is though, and ide fancy autocompletion aren't helping with that

text has proven for millenias to be an effective way to represent ideas, so do get married to it

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

#106

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

A wonderful read. I love how he basically mocks the product everybody in the room is using. "While I’m on the subject of variable names, I should say something good about Visual Studio." - that's basically the only time where he says something good about it.

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

#107

Post by GarvielLoken »

tartoran wrote: post #102
GarvielLoken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the Butlerian Jihad my friend

Whats the Butlerian Jihad?

It was an event in the Dune timeline where humans overthrew their machine overlords and vowed to never build machines in the lines of the human mind and never become dependent on machines or mechanical thinking again.

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

#108

Post by ryeguy »

pingyong wrote: post #69
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 genuinely cannot tell if this is supposed to be satire or not.

Not satire, just hacker news.

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

#109

Post by ryeguy »

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…

As you gain more experience in software development, you'll look back at this post and laugh.

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

#110

Post by jcdentonunatco »

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 must work on really simple projects
Post reply on HN