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Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

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Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#151

Post by derefr »

guiomie wrote: post #128
derefr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'd give them a problem, and their first instinct was to hit a period and start hunting through the method options that IntelliSync gave them to see if one got them closer to their goal. I use dynamic languages and have never touched an IDE, but I still do this. If I find out I need some feature provided by libfoo to accomplish a task, then, before I even look up the libfoo docs, I try this, or an equivalent: requ…

what language is this ?

Ruby, as entered into an irb session: http://i.imgur.com/58ceKcR.png

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#152

Post by bottompair »

Tobani wrote: post #48
chrislomax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It pains me if I am honest. Our CMS is built on .NET and it's like an uphill battle selling it as it's on IIS and it's .NET. I have played around with the idea of reworking it into an open source language and open source database but I would miss Visual Studio and the language a lot. I don't get all the hate?

I have done a lot of Java, Scala, etc. IntelliJ & Eclipse are both wonderful IDEs in their own right. A lot of things like ReSharper were in those IDEs before Jetbrains (maker of IntelliJ) made the plugin for VS. After trying VS for a couple of projects I found it completely baffling and backwards. And I don't think this is because VS is bad, but because the way I approach software is completely different. I want to…

"I want to be able to compile things from the command-line first and use the IDE to edit the code."

You want a text editor, not an IDE.

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#153

Post by dewiz »

gabriel wrote: post #103
michaelmior wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Mono? I have no idea how practical this is for real code bases, but I've used it successfully on several smaller projects.

Mono is quite practical. However, C# is one thing, and the .NET Memory Model is quite another. The memory model is, IMHO, where Microsoft is pushing the limits of the existing C# language.

could someone point to some article that expand on this topic ? thanks

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#154

Post by seanmcdirmid »

curveship wrote: post #107

As someone who has recently been hiring .NET engineers, I have to admit that this inspires mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can see huge power from combining AI and search with the structured context of programming. On the other hand, a disappointing number of the people we interviewed weren't software engineers, they were IntelliSync engineers. We'd give them a problem, and their first instinct was to hit a period…

> We'd give them a problem, and their first instinct was to hit a period and start hunting through the method options that IntelliSync gave them to see if one got them closer to their goal.

IntelliSense is like GPS for programming. When driving, do you prefer to plan your trip using a map or use the GPS instead? I guess there are still people in the former camp, but most younger people are in the latter.

> Instead of stepping back and thinking about the problem generally, they'd try to solve it by stringing together IntelliSync suggestions, like stepping stones across a pond.

And are they less efficient for diving in right away and using their tools vs. waterfall planning up-front?

Kids these days...

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#155

Post by seanmcdirmid »

josephschmoe wrote: post #122
doczoidberg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In business it doesn't matter how you reach a goal. It's not about clean code, it's about getting fast, working results to a specific problem.

That really depends on your business. If you make an operating system, for instance, clean code is probably in your best interest.

Ever see early versions of Linux? As Richard Gabriel says, worse is often better...

Now aircraft control systems or MRI machines...you probably want very clean code.

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#156

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sqs wrote: post #71
rl3 wrote: post #17

It will be quite nice if this ends up yielding results for individual JavaScript frameworks some day.

I'm one of the creators of Sourcegraph, which does have results for many JavaScript frameworks. You can find examples from all across GitHub, and you can search by function name or full-text documentation. JS is hard to analyze, but we're working hard on getting better--and the analysis code is open source[1]. https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/joyent/node https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/jashkenas/underscore https…

Have you looked into Dr. JS?

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dimvar/jstypes.html

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#157

Post by curveship »

Tarks wrote: post #110
curveship wrote: post #107

As someone who has recently been hiring .NET engineers, I have to admit that this inspires mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can see huge power from combining AI and search with the structured context of programming. On the other hand, a disappointing number of the people we interviewed weren't software engineers, they were IntelliSync engineers. We'd give them a problem, and their first instinct was to hit a period…

It's Intellisense. I might have a chip on my shoulder but if you were competent and really were hiring .net programmers you should know that? Especially if you're going to take the mickey. You get those types no matter what role they hide in. Today I spent an hour with a candidate that looked really promising on paper dodge every question and switch from being "mainly backend" to "mainly frontend" when they couldn't…

Hah! Yes, I am (or pretend to be) competent, just not when writing HN comments ;). Thanks for the daily serving of humble pie.

I do wonder if there's something about .NET and a business environment that encourages this kind of behavior. When the organization's values are in their business rather than mentoring programmers, when they tell their programmers to "just get it done," you end up with IntelliSyn...Sense programmers? I've worked in various different programmer ecosystems, and I've never seen this pattern so strongly. There are of course excellent .NET programmers, I don't mean to say otherwise. And I got the feeling that several of the people we interviewed had basic talent, they'd just been trained, intentionally or not, towards this kind of behavior.

We started putting VS in front of candidates precisely to deal with the kind of fuzziness you mention. We started with whiteboarding code, but a lot of candidates would have a wrong design, then add a line of pseudo-code that they claimed magically made it work. By having them write actual code, it forced them to be explicit and to deal with unexpected outcomes.

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#158

Post by Tobani »

bottompair wrote: post #152
Tobani wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done a lot of Java, Scala, etc. IntelliJ & Eclipse are both wonderful IDEs in their own right. A lot of things like ReSharper were in those IDEs before Jetbrains (maker of IntelliJ) made the plugin for VS. After trying VS for a couple of projects I found it completely baffling and backwards. And I don't think this is because VS is bad, but because the way I approach software is completely different. I want to…

"I want to be able to compile things from the command-line first and use the IDE to edit the code." You want a text editor, not an IDE.

Not true. I want still want the IDE compile, type check, and add type-safe completions (When using statically typed languages). I want the IDE to assist me in writing the code. I want my IDE to launch/attach to processes for debugging. Generally, I want the IDE to produce binaries yes, but mostly for my own consumption.

I want to be able to access the compiler external from the IDE so I can automate builds/deployments easily.

Now I want both types of builds to happen in as close to the same manner as possible so they're consistent, but both are important.

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#159

Post by benologist »

kevingadd wrote: post #147
Pacabel wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is only true for perhaps the simplest "Hello World!"-level apps. Much beyond that and it just isn't trivial to use those alternative tools effectively, even when you're specifically targeting them and not actual .NET.

I've deployed fairly large .NET applications to Mono with only trivial modifications. They behaved equivalently, even if Mono's garbage collector isn't as good.

My smaller experience only had problems within SqlDbType particularly with Date acting as strings and Structured not existing.

Re: Introducing Bing Code Search for C#

#160

Post by ryanmolden »

gisenberg wrote: post #52
chrislomax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It pains me if I am honest. Our CMS is built on .NET and it's like an uphill battle selling it as it's on IIS and it's .NET. I have played around with the idea of reworking it into an open source language and open source database but I would miss Visual Studio and the language a lot. I don't get all the hate?

I think it's less about not wanting to use Visual Studio and more about not wanting to have a Windows VM thrashing resources. I've worked with teams that have migrated to ServiceStack just to avoid running Windows. Assuming that running Windows is a non-issue, the parts that really, really bug me are: - Background operations suddenly become foreground operations that stall the IDE with a dialog saying "A background o…

Far and away the biggest problem with the background/foreground issues is COM and its apartment models. A large part of some of the core pieces of Visual Studio are (still) written in native code and are STA bound objects (mostly when they don't really need to be, but that's another discussion).

Converting off of STA in legacy code is extremely difficult due to the transitive nature of it as well as the fact you likely have very large and complex types which were never written to be thread-safe because the STA protected them from that (let's not talk about re-entrancy though :)).

It is getting better since managed code has MTA semantics by default, but even with async code all it takes is one person calling Wait on a Task on the UI thread...

A huge sync API surface that is publicly callable also doesn't help. Even if you want to make things async under the covers you generally can't since callers are expecting synchronous semantics and there is no (good) way to make work async, present a sync calling surface to callers, and not block the UI thread (if you say nested message pump, you lose :P)

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