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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."
I have a good friend whose son is brilliant. He looks at anything, and instantly is taking it apart and putting it back together. In our technical day and age, he has tinkered with computers a LOT and has shown great acumen in troubleshooting and configuring not only Windows, but putting together a network.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
He is now taking some programming classes, and while he is doing well, they have begun java, and it has totally thrown him. He's getting back on his feet, but his initial foray into VS gave him some bad (and some wrong) insights into programming and languages.
His reaction so far to having to actually write and understand code is that it is stupid. I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe. He is doing well in his class but he constantly wants to go back and do the drag and drop thing.
Help I did type Y work for years and now I'm doing type X. Things are different and I don't understand, why!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is in the section where he's talking about filling in event handlers for a VB form:
> This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a
> program not as a complete coherent document,
> but as little snippets of code attached to visual objects.
So true. You can't "read" the program, instead, you can only leap about from handler to handler. And another good point when talking about a XAML demo:
> It was very, very cool, except that the 12 tick marks
> of the clock were implemented in 12 virtually identical chunks of XAML.
I'm not sure about this one - seems that one of the few times that duplicated code is OK is when it's in generated code; i.e., in a JavaCC-generated parser. For everything else, there's CPD, the Copy/Paste Detector.
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They allow and perhaps encourage, but they don't force anything...
Visual Studio (VS newer than VS 6, up to and including VS 2005) is in the top 3 products MS has ever produced (behind MS Office and MS SQL Server). Powerful, flexible, and yes, it allows for very rapid development.
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I don't like MSFT any more than the next guy, but they do a couple things right:
...)
1) Hardware (keyboards, mice,
2) Developer tools
I find Microsoft tools like VS.net and even some of their languages (C#) to be surprisingly good.
Granted, I prefer Open Source most of the time, but when forced to use certain Microsoft things like Natural Keyboards or Visual Studio, I kind of like them.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for supporting them, but hey I'm just being honest.
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I'm a C# coder who uses Visual Studio 2003 8 hours a day during the week. I recently got an MRI and the results were unanimous - TEH BRAIN ROT!
I will say VS has "allowed" more "unqualified" developers into the mix due to the ease in using the tool, but to say it would effect the creativity of a good developer is bullshit. This guy sounds like the old time machinists who bitch about CNC over a mill and lathe.
There's a reason we start with printf("Hello World."); and not with dragging a text box into a big white rectangle.
Beware the coder who can't for the life of him code without it.
Is it good or bad? I can't tell you. But the more disconnected from the environment and the machine, the less comfortable I feel about programming. Then again, the only program languages I know are Assembler for 6809, general forms of original BASIC and C. Object oriented stuff more or less caused me to lose interest in programming because it was increasingly difficult to imagine what the computer was really doing when it was executing my code. With BASIC and C, I can mentally write the assembler code and understand what's going on.
So... yeah I can see where programmer's eye-candy would be a major distraction for a programmer just getting started. But "back in the day" useful code could be written in Basic and C... wasn't complex or beautiful but served some purpose. In today's visual environments, it's not too hard to imagine kids getting REALLY bored with making meaningless code that doesn't look like the apps they are accustomed to running... but it's that meaningless code that really drives apps right?
Maybe I'm missing something important (and I probably am) but my initial impressions of graphical RAD tools are that it's a lot of flash and bluster but doesn't inspire a coder to write code.
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.
I often end up reviewing or working on code from other people, and I couldn't agree more about his dislike of generated code.
Note that there are two sorts: the kind you never edit and the kind you have to edit. I love compilers, as they generate machine code so well that you never should have to look at it. But programs that generate source code or, even worse, documentation, are things I revile. They let an amateur get quick results, but at a drastic reduction in long-term maintainability. As Martin Fowler says, "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."
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.
You seem to be comparing 'Playing with Visual Studio' against 'Taking programming classes'.
:o)
Visual Studio is not a teaching aid. It's (just about) a programming toolkit with some bolted on frameworks. You will create rubbish if you do not know what you are doing. Try thowing eclipse at him, he would have the same problem.
Having said that, I hate having to program with Visual Studio. It's like a great big book of usefull spells, but they are written in invisble ink
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Why, in case the martians attack and take out all our strategic IDE reserves?
"Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality"
Force? noone's forcing me to use the RAD tools; I use VS primarily as an editor with intellisense and solution/project file management; no more, nor less. FUD.
- Oisin
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If the first tool you introduce someone too teaches people, particularly bright kids, not to think about...
Exactly; if a person needs an IDE in order to understand the code, then that person is not a programmer, they are an IDE operator. IDEs are the assembly line of the programming world; you can get cheaper, less skilled labour to produce something adequate using it. I wouldn't say that they necessarily "rot the brain", but they do keep many people from ever improving beyond the level of being an IDE operator.
If used correctly Visual Studio does not "rot your brain" or cause bad habits.
The places where Visual Studio excels is in some of the following:
Code/syntax highlighting
Structure/layout
Designing graphical aspects (forms, window layouts, etc.)
And others
One of my favorite features is the form of auto-completion and showing function prototypes. You don't have to have memorized the entire Win32 API to be a "good" programmer. Documentation comes in many forms and by having the IDE tell you when you open a parenthesis what the function expects as inputs is just another way of looking at the docs.
The one place where I think that an IDE can cause some harm for new programmers is the "shake-and-bake" method of designing an app where it asks 10 questions and writes the code for you. Past that, IDEs are a great tool for managing larger programming projects.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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...I'd agree that you're just as well off working in a text editor. However, most software projects involve using other folk's libraries - whether Microsoft's, other vendors' or just libraries created by your co-workers.
I just finished a project where a co-worker of mine worked on the business logic objects for a system and I did the presentation and screen flow. Yeah, I could've fished through his JavaDocs and designs. That would have added 10-30 minutes everytime I had to figure out a new call to one of his libraries. Instead, I could hit "." in Eclipse, pull up the methods and select the one that I needed. In the future, other folks on my team will need to support that code. Being able to receive documentation from within the editor will make their jobs much easier.
It's interesting that the project that author most enjoyed was a C program he wrote for his own amusement. Unfortunately, most of the coding folks do for money involves working with others. While working individually on a project is more fun, being able to do so is typically a luxury.
Eclipse does something like IntelliSense, but it does it correctly, assuming his description of IntelliSense is correct.
Basically, Eclipse doesn't do anything while you're typing. If you type out "id" and a space, it stays "id" with a space after it. In fact, Eclipse won't do anything if you just type "id." It will only start offering suggestions after you enter a period to access an object's properties and methods. Even then, if you're typing fast enough, it won't pop up anything. If you pause, it will display a list, but it won't alter your typing unless you press enter. So if you have a new object, and you decide it needs an "id" field, which you haven't defined yet, you can simply do "object.id = foo;" and Eclipse won't replace "id" with anything. (It will, however, flag it as an error, since "id" isn't defined in this example.)
Now there's another feature of Eclipse's implementation: pressing Control-Space anywhere a Java identifier can go will bring up a list of identifiers that can fit there. (This includes things like in doc comments.) So if you don't want to type out "ExcessivelyLongInterfaceNameInterface," you can just type "E" and hit Control-Space, and up will pop a list of everything that starts with "E." However, it will NEVER replace what you're typing, until you press enter. Continuing to type will further refine the list, so if you type "x" after popping on the list above, it'll further refine the list to things that begin with "Ex."
This gives you all the power of Microsoft's IntelliSense (something I missed when going from Visual J++ to Java 1.2 all those years ago), but causes none of the "don't do that for me" problems the author of the article was complaining about.
I don't think his complaint was the concept of code assistance, it was Microsoft's implementation.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Got my degree in CS and programmed almost entirely in *nix and using Emacs. Did my senior thesis using C# and VS .Net. Don't really notice anything different really... The only difference is that I use the .Net library which gives me a lot of prebuilt stuff. VS.Net is not all that different from what Emacs was for me. They both accomplish one thing and that's to save/write my code to a file. I fail to see what was forced on anyone. Programming, the actual process of writing the code is VERY simple. All you need is a text editor and something to compile it afterwards. So I don't see how any tool you use to do that can force you to do anything. If I have bad techniques or habits, that's my fault. If nothing else, VS.Net has made commenting and generating documentation a lot easier. My programming technique isn't something I'm going to blame/give credit to MSFT--not this one for sure.
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All articles like this overgeneralize.
No offense,
But, taking stuff apart doesn't make you brilliant. Most of us geeks took things apart when we were kids. People around us said the same things you're saying about so and so's kid. The kid is stumped with java because he's having to go beyond instant gratification and actually learn something. There is a fundamental difference between just discovering random facts and learning ideas that have depth. Just because he can play video games or memorize oodles of random computer facts, or fankly, even put a network together, doesn't mean much. I'm not saying the kid isn't smart, most geeks are "smart", few are brilliant.
It's good for him to struggle. He'll find out if he's really brilliant. His response that the ideas are stupid is just his ego combined with youth. Does he think math is stupid too?
My point is that visual studio isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that mucking about with computers is equivalent to learning difficult things. Whipping up some crappy kid-app in Visual Basic is about as difficult as Whipping up some crappy speakers in woodshop. It no more makes you a programmer, or dare I say, a computer scientist, than building the crappy speaker makes you an acoustic engineer.
The kids problem isn't visual studio, the kids problem is that the stuff he's done requires tinkering and doing but no hard thinking. Now he's being forced to think and it sounds like he's finding out that it's not quite as easy as just doing. That's good!
ymmv.
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While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code.
This only demonstrates that Visual Studio is a bad environment for "teaching yourself", not that using Visual Studio is a bad thing in our professional lives. VS has fully fledged languages behind it (nothing stopping you from compiling/linking from the command-line...). There is nothing about VS that intrinsically limits the depth of one's understanding.
For Professionals: I think this point from the professional's perspective is really well covered by Andy Hunt and David Thomas in Section 35 of "The Pragmatic Programmer": "Evil Wizards".
In summary: If you use code generated by wizards and other similar tools without understanding what that code does, you are going to run into problems. Wizards and generators are tools that can increase your productivity (why bother writing code a computer can write for you?), but if you don't understand what they're doing, then you are going to run into troubles. Finally, their tip: "Don't use wizard code you don't understand".
For students: Regardless of the language/environment that kids start on, they need someone to guide them. They need to be taught the underlying concepts behind functions and classes. They need to be taught a few fundamental design concepts. They need to be taught some of the common idioms. If they aren't then how can they get it right? For the VS learners, it will be the flashy wizard generated dialogs that do very little, and ungracefully. For the console/C learners, it will be the almost-as-flashy text based menus (generated with reams of printfs), that do very little, and ungracefully.
Yeah - I originally learnt to program (in Turbo Pascal and C) in a self-directed manner, and I had the same problem as the kid you talk about. It wasn't until many years later at Uni, that I finally learnt to program.
I tried to turn him on to coding, but he went out and got Visual Studio, and went off on his own. He came back and proudly demonstrated his various creations.
Shoulda started with Perl. Everyone knows Perl is the best language for learning quality programming skills.
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"While I liked his creativity, it was evident his depth of grasp of the workings of programming were as deep as VS allowed him. Cute screens with cute input buttons and cute input boxes. But nothing in the sense of real code."
As deep as VS "allowed" him? WTF are you talking about? I've used VS every workday for 7 years. I gather it has some sort of functions for making cute screens with buttons on them? I wouldn't know, I've never written a gui app.
He's a kid. He wanted to make something he thought was cool; and he did, good for him. It makes sense he went for the drag-together an EZ-GUI stuff; He made something that looked cool and didn't do much. I'm guessing "looks cool" was his design target.
Heck, I first got into programing (time to date myself) writing BASIC programs to draw maps of D&D dungeons. 99% of what I learned in my first months of coding was the details of the particular extended ascii set my computer suported. I learned useless trivia and wrote lousy code in pusuit of eye-candy. But eventually, I wanted to move a marker around the dungeon, then I wanted to keep track of what was in different rooms. Today I make a fairly nice living writing complex C++ without a bit of eye-candy anywhere near it.
In short, leave the kid alone. Soon enough he'll want those cute buttons to do real stuff. If adults can be kept from eliminating his fun by insisting that "real" programs can't look good, he'll be a crackerjack coder in no time.
... you mean where you modify code at runtime while running it inside a debugger?
:-)
Get on Mac OS X, and start coding using Xcode. You may drool once you find the Fix & Continue (ZeroLink) feature.
I think that's a dangerous culture to cultivate in an IT universe.
Oh Jeez, get over yourself.
You've completely ignored the subtleties of a choice made by an intelligent mind when presented with different ways to do things. I find it fascinating he went right to the GUI and started developing code that way. Instead, you're peeved he didn't start figuring out what include files to use to do a printf() to a console.
Maybe the path he blazes will be the next paradigm. History is full of people making huge leaps in technology by finding easier ways to do things that interested them, but were against the norm.
Viewed from this perspective, I think you should step off and let him learn what he wants how he wants, and not in a way that pleases you.
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First, none of the features he complains about are unique to Visual Studio- intellisense, visual designers, code generation all have counterparts in other code editors.
Second, any code editor is a tool. In the end, they are a fancy way to create text files to compile into binary. There are people who use VS to write code without understanding what it's doing behind the scenes, just like there are people who drive without knowing how an internal combustion engine works.
Finally, there are people who hand-write all their code, waste alot of time, and still write bad code.
IDEs can definitely help you understand the code faster, however. Take Eclipse, for example:
Granted, I could understand the code without an IDE, but it's going to take me longer. I don't know if you were being sarcastic (I'm a little tired, so not so mentally keen), but people who use IDEs should not be written off as the equivalent of assembly line operators...
- shadowmatter
I agree. What you know before using a tool like Visual Studio (C# of course) is what counts in life.
/. crowd is critical of the VS suite. For what it is designed for the Visual Studio does a great job at allowing coders with a solid background to develop application quickly and completely. They might not be the most efficient application performance wise, but most computers today have CPU cycles to burn. Any ways C# was designed to develop business applications, not enterprise applications. If you are developing something where CPU cycles and RAM are critical you need to be using C or even assembly.
It is too bad that the
I fail to see how providing RAD tools in VS is somehow a shortcoming. Isn't that like saying you should rip most of the features out of Emacs because when you have to use another editor they won't be there anymore?
Anyone who switches from VC to GCC and expects #import to work has bigger problems to worry about. Being a muppet, for one.
Whether the 'old' timers (myself being one) like the abstraction of low level coding and what is becoming mainstream, this is an evolution of development.
Visual Basic back in 1992 was in of itself a massive advance for this type of programming and programming understanding. Look at all the 1000s of VB applications from this time period by people that truly had very little coding experience.
However, some of the VB programs from this time were quite effective.
I think the biggest injustice to programming and the programming community as a whole, is the lack of UI guidelines, and understanding usability and User Interaction and User Flow.
How many times have you grabbed a GOOD program, with brillant LOW LEVEL coded features, but the interface to the application work about as well as a broken pay phone.
So sure VS can remove the user from 'low level coding', but this is NOT always a bad thing.
As development EVOLVES, there is NO REASON with the AI in the development tools and the AI in the code produced by these development tools should not be used. Why should a person in the 21st century truly have to fully understand memory allocation, advanced recursion, or even see program past advanced event handlers, as that is what programs ARE - event handlers...
Why do we have to beat down development tools just because they remove the developer from having to DO THINGS THE Tool or Compiler should DO FOR YOU? This is what makes advanced devleopment and the progression of better applications bloom.
Go back to the VB of 1992, it was a major eplosion for application availability. Sure some of the programs were crap and from people that had no idea of coding, but there were also serious developers that didn't want to take time to screw with all the crap that a developer in THIS DAY and AGE should not have to do.
I welcome development tools advancement. Sure there is some fundamental coding knowledge that everyone should know, but you can't blame these tools for this.
I could have the same arguments about many projects in the Open Source world, they are brilliant, but since the coders have little undertsanding of usability or UI guidelines, they applications are virtually worthless to anyone that is not a geek.
I'm not even arguing VS is the best set of tools out there, Borland still makes some really great development environments. I still like Delphi, and am amazed of how tight the code it produces, and yet how much it DOES FOR ME, even if I do know how to do the things it is doing for me is irrelevant.
We not only need to support development that is beyond a text editor and command line compiler, but we also need to support development tools that try to structure and help users with usability for the people that will be using the applications. PERIOD.
VS and Borland products are pretty good, but they could even be better - imagine a development environment that gives a flag when it notices a break in usability, or gives a compile warning after it 'intellectually' sees the appliction has many inconsistencies that would confuse the user.
Additionally, VS is even dated for what the new Microsoft Development and technologies are introducing. VS2005 barely touches the abilities of future Windows development - that is why the 'Expression' like of products will be used to augment the UI and User experiene for VS applications.
Give the world a couple of years, and the foundations of 'native' understanding being built into the next generation of Windows Vista, WILL change not only the user experience, but the development world. Leapfrogging concepts of today.
Go look up some of the concepts Microsoft has introduced and HAS that are often overlooked, go do a search on the last PDC. There are things in Vista that move development to a new level of understanding and functionality for not only developers, but what the users will start to see in the next 5 years.
It is like one of the brains behind the XAML and XPS systems in
Earth? Cool? Lucky, lucky you, weren't you the spoiled brat? Back in the day, I had to envision a billion Buddhas within a billion Buddhas within a billion Buddhas, all on top of a turtle's back just to get a big bang and some actual space time with matter...
It's a friggin kid we're talking about. What did you do when you were programming as a kid, if you did ? I know i tried to have the computer display fancy stuff, in stupid ways. I wrote some sort of "demos" consisting of loops likeor composed some sort of animations in an ascii 8x8 grid because i didn't know of sprites and all the stuff. That was probably stupid, utterly useless, and definitely not the good tool for the job. I should have been using assembly at the time, and some sort of backbuffer instead of calling cls... But what the heck, that's what made me love programming. At the time i remember i tried to join some computer clubs, but they all were doing some things i thought were utterly boring, like learning how to use spreadsheets, or having programs "behave in an intelligent way" (that is, validating input...).
They were right, validating input is more than necessary in even the most stupid program, and using a spreadsheet instead of making a custom program yourself for each formula is certainly a good idea. But it wasn't fancy, and was very boring to do... Let this kid alone, he'll understand soon enough that you can certainly make nice looking programs with vs, but you have to learn programming to have them do anything usefull. And if he's really interested, he'll learn that too. And i'll congrat him because frankly, when i was a kid learning to program 8 bit computers was certainly a fun thing to do, but now with all the stuff you have to know, the fact that you can only access the computer via stupid apis that you have to learn, you have to be really interested by it to find it amusing. Computers are boring nowadays, seriously...
Writing C code in vi will rot the brain... or make it stronger.
In either case, something drastic is going to happen. Tread lightly.
Everyone here seems to be under the impression that Visual Studio hides the source/nuts and bolts/inner workings from you. It doesn't. You can program assembly and K&R C if you so wish. (Using Visual Basic/J++/C# is a different thing, but that's more of an argument against those languages than Visual Studio.)
Granted, you can draw a dialog box by hand, but you can also create that dialog by assigning an HWND to point to the result of a CreateWindowEx(). You can also manually code your own .rc resource scripts and use the MAKEINTRESOURCE macro. Do whatever makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, but don't say Visual Studio is t3h n00b! shift+1
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Perl isn't "complicated." It's just that C is retarded. I mean, really, in the "real world," you will never have to make a starry background. Perl (and especially Ruby) allow the perfect mixture of very high- and high-level elements. In fact, in Ruby, you can mix in modules and polymorphically redefine derived classes in the same function if you were so inclined.
And, *no*, you do not have to understand anything about rendering black or whatever. No Fourier transforms or 11-dimension existentialism either. (The only "strings" for you are scalars!)
Anyway, your code in Perl:
perl -e'while(){print int rand 99.99?" ":"."}'
Written in a term, by the way.