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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com

71–80 of 122 posts

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

#71
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 need Typescript, otherwise you might make a mistake with types? Never had that problem in the past

Project size metrics needed.

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

#72
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…

Intellisense allows me to write code without having to check definitions of types that I'm using.

e.g I'm using type and I can just check list of its properties at current place instead of having to go to the definition

same with liberaries, despite that it may not be the smartest thing to do (you should check docs) it works fine very often

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

#73

Anecdote from this week: I've been working on a Python project that uses several classes and subclasses, with code paths that move around a lot through the class hierarchy. I was trying to add some functionality but kept getting bogged down trying to make sure all the subclasses implement the same interface, using Atom as the text editor. Then I installed PyCharm and completed the task in just a few hours thanks to t…

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.

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

#75
post #11

> And I sincerely hope that in five or ten years from now, we’re not still watching reruns of Friends. I have bad news for Charles.

I think to me the allure of Friends is not only that it's good and that we didn't get anything better in the meantime. It's also almost like Star Trek. It's Sci-Fi now.

There is technology which is distinctly modern, yet a bit different to our own, people mostly get along, there's no 1984 world actually implemented (FB, Google, China), there's effectively no post 9/11 world and the shine and optimism of the 80s and the naivete of the 90s was still around. Everything was pretty neat. The 0.01% were still mostly in hiding.

It's also of course nostalgia but it's not just nostalgia .

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

#76
post #11

> And I sincerely hope that in five or ten years from now, we’re not still watching reruns of Friends. I have bad news for Charles.

What does he have against Friends?

It's pretty cheap and simple entertainment, but I think it accidentally proved to be greater than we could know then. See my previous comment.

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

#77
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.

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

#78
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…

> Even if it can gain you a little speed increase, it still is better to write things down for your 'codebase memory'.

> [...] You need Typescript, otherwise you might make a mistake with types?

You can use your 'codebase memory' instead.

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

#79
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 can totally imagine that for a beginner developer it can make the difference... I believe in writing every character of my code and testing it thoroughly, I wrote many bug free codebases with it, that's my experience. 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 disint…

I had the same reaction as you, for the same reasons. That said, I'm a bit more skeptical about the proliferation of automated code formatters run e.g. as pre-commit hooks. A project-wide consistent formatting style is the right thing to have in 90% of the cases, but neither the style guides nor the tools enforcing them are perfect. There are situations where a particular piece of code will suffer a readability penalty if formatted in a standard way. For those situations, the formatter must have a way to locally disable it.

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

#80
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.

I use code completion for exploratory programming all the time. Questions like "can I convert this to a string" become easy. My coding is much more fluid because of it - it's a dialog with an assistant - "help me with telling what you can do" - rather than me writing overly specific orders to a machine.

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