4mo ago

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

charlespetzold.com

Visual Studio @programming.dev

💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱 @programming.dev

4mo ago

Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding By Charles Petzold

charlespetzold.com /etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

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TL;DR: Intellisense works best if you write bottom-up (true) and it means you have to remember less stuff (also true), therefore it makes you write worse code (very doubtful).
So I don’t think IntelliSense is helping us become better programmers. The real objective is for us to become faster programmers, which also means that it’s cheapening our labor.
This doesn't make any sense though.
People don't have unlimited time. Writing high quality code takes time and wasting it remembering or typing stuff that Intellisense can take care of means I have less time for refactoring etc. Also one of the really useful things about Intellisense is that it enables better refactoring tools!
It doesn't make you dumber to use tool assistance. It just means you get less practice in doing the thing that the tool helps you with. Does that matter? Of course not! Does it matter that I can't remember how to do long division because I always use a calculator? Absolutely not. Similarly it doesn't matter that I can't remember off the top of my head which languages use starts_with, HasPrefix, startswith, etc. doesn't matter at all if Intellisense can easily tell me.
You don't have to use the Intellisense suggestions. Just press escape. It's very easy.
It's very well known that making something easier to do increases demand for it.
- I don't think it's true that it works best by doing bottom-up. I develop top-down all the time.
  Whenever you need a new function/method/struct field/enum variant, just write its name where you are going to use it. Then intellisense will complain that it doesn't exist. Press Ctrl+. (Or whatever you have keybinded to "apply suggestion") And now it suddenly exists and intelligence works perfectly fine. It will just place a todo!() or raise UnimplementedException or whatever so you don't forget to implement it later.
  
  Yeah that is true. Not all IDEs support that though.
Very long shitpost?
¿
(Not so) Fun fact: I first learnt how to use Xamarin from a book he wrote. It wasn't very good (not unlike Microsoft documentation). He started out just having everything in MainPage, then switched to having separate classes (like MVVM stuff), but didn't point out he had made this switch! The code snippets didn't reflect that this was actually now in a different class! Wait what?? Wait what?? Why is none of this working?! 😂 There was a later chapter about MVVM, but he had switched styles BEFORE that chapter. So when he talks about top-down and bottom-up, well, his book was an explode in the middle approach! 😂
No.
Although I think it's a symptom of a larger problem. At the very least, consider Rider (or for non-C# code, VS Code/Codium/your terminal editor of choice).
At work, we have to use VS for C# development though, due to us having VS licenses and not Rider licenses. I guess we could use VS Code for C# dev, but I could also use Morse code to type, and neither of those sound like a good time when you take our work tooling into account.
that is an ungodly 40 minute read without much of a takeaway. Here's the AI generated tl;dr
The author recounts a reluctant experience with public speaking, stemming from a past incident where he discussed topics beyond his audience's expectations. Despite initially hesitating, he revives his experience to talk about "Computers in the Movies," drawing parallels between the portrayal of computers in films and real technological advances. The author highlights the impact of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and WarGames in depicting computers as both helpers and threats, often reflecting societal fears about technology. He contrasts Hollywood’s dramatizations with today's mundane reality of technology, pointing out how things like email and PowerPoint have subtly influenced our behaviors and thinking, suggesting that our relationship with technology is akin to addiction rather than dependency. Transitioning to modern development practices, the author critiques tools like Visual Studio and features like IntelliSense for shaping, perhaps simplifying, programming methods. Despite these tools' capabilities, he fears they undermine coding skills by promoting faster but potentially less thoughtful programming. Finally, he reflects on the shift from traditional coding, highlighting the value of returning to basic coding tasks to rediscover the joy of pure algorithmic programming, away from the complexity of modern integrated development environments and pre-written frameworks.
- Here's a summarization of the summary (also done by AI, because lazy):
  The author recalls his initial reluctance to speak publicly after a past misstep and later revisits the subject by examining how movies, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and WarGames, dramatize computers. He contrasts these cinematic portrayals with the subtle influence of everyday technologies like email and PowerPoint, and criticizes modern development tools like Visual Studio and IntelliSense for potentially diminishing deep coding skills. Ultimately, he champions a return to fundamental programming to rediscover the pure joy of coding.
  
  how didn't I think of that, thanks!
- Imagine when the author hears about the “Create an app in 20 minutes with AI” tools.
  
  to be fair, that's a talk from 2005, but I can imagine the new article taking longer to read than the app to be created.
There can't be much brain there to rot if it's still using Microsoft products.
I like this quote
and just the other day I caught myself wondering who will clean out my Inbox after I’m dead
I think that it's bad to become too dependent on a certain tool, especially if that tool is owned by microsoft, although in this case your dependent on various microsoft api:s anyway so that's probably a bigger problem in that regard. Experimenting with programing without Visual Studio is a good idea and will probably teach you lots of things about yourself and microsoft api documentation in this case. If microsoft has built a system that is so impractical that you need visual studio to navigate it, that's a pretty bad sign for the health of the microsoft ecosystem, but that's not exactly surprising anyone
I always thought writing and debugging code on VS was fine. Where I never liked Visual Studio was building especially cross-platform building or just using special tools etc. Fankly just give me an editor and Make, but make sucks on Windows due to slow process startup. But I do like the VS debugger.

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