Does Visual Studio Rot the Brain?

duffbeer703 writes "As a UNIX guy dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows world, I've never really been able to enjoy Windows programming. Charles Petzold, who is a long-time developer for DOS & Windows really laid out the reasons for me at the NYC .NET Dev group. Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality."

Comments

For those of us who don't care

[mikejz84]

I use VB6 and .net when I need to bang out an app, esp for database stuff. I known dame well it's the ideal way, but then again, I don't call myself a programmer. I really don't care about the deep stuff, just making something to get the job done. If I need something better, I would hire someone to do it. .net is like an automatic car; purist dispise them, but for 90% of people, they could care less, they are not intrested in the car, just were it can get them.

What about Eclipse?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse has even more nice/brain-rotting features than Visual Studio, mostly because Java is a much easier language for an IDE to understand than C++ because there is no preprocessor. In fact Eclipse makes Visual Studio look like not much more than Notepad with a GUI builder. It even detects compile errors and warnings as you type. So it totally encourages that bottom-up programming style. Is it also evil? Developing Java in Eclipse is so much faster than developing it by hand, and Eclipse provides tools to "clean up" what you did by refactoring, tools to automatically generate stubs for those undefined classes/methods that you're calling to get rid of those nasty red underlines representing compile errors, etc. I would say it's just much easier to make an IDE smart if it knows what you're doing, i.e. you declare stuff before using it.

Re:Breakpoint and resume coding

[TrancePhreak]

Visual Studio 6 had that for C/C++, Apple was playing catch up too!

Re:Does it? Not sure. But from experience I can sa

[pthisis]

The functionality you mention has nothing to do with an IDE (which is about integrating the development chain) and has been readily available in most decent programming editors for over a decade.

* If I see a class name I don't recognize, I can control-click to go to the class definition. If the source is not attached, I at least get a view of all the method signatures.

If you hit ctrl-t in vim, you go to the class definition (or function definition, variable definition, etc). I can't remember the keybinding in emacs, but it's in the context menu or M-x follow-tag.

* If my code invokes a method I don't recognize, I can hover the mouse over the method and the Javadoc description of the method will pop up, telling me what the method does, what the arguments are for, and what the return value is.

K in vim brings up the man pages or info pages for the defined function. I use it with Python docs; Java programmers use it with Javadoc. Emacs has similar capability.

* If I'm navigating through someone else's class hierarchy, by selecting the class name and pressing Ctrl+T I can see all interfaces this class implements, and its superclasses from which it inherits methods. If I hit Ctrl+T again, I can see all classes that inherit from this class, and what classes inherit from them, etc.

Sounds like emacs' oobr or vim's cscope interface (which is used for more than just C in vim).

If I hot Ctrl+O, I can see all the methods callable from my current cursor position. I can also see all variables within scope.

This is the only point that vim doesn't do by default yet (there are 3rd party packages to give similar completions, and vim 7 that encompasses this and a more powerful Intellisense(tm)-type thing). Emacs has this feature, though.