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Microsoft's Top Devs Don't Seem To Like Own Tools
ericatcw writes "Through tools such as Visual Basic and Visual Studio, Microsoft may have done more than any other vendor to make drag and drop-style programming mainstream. But its superstar developers seem to prefer old-school modes of crafting code. During the panel at the Professional Developers Conference earlier this month, the devs also revealed why they think writing tight, bare-metal code will come back into fashion, and why parallel programming hasn't caught up with the processors yet." These guys are senior enough that they don't seem to need to watch what they say and how it aligns with Microsoft's product roadmap. They are also dead funny. Here's Jeffrey Snover on managed code (being pushed by Microsoft through its Common Language Runtime tech): "Managed code is like antilock brakes. You used to have to be a good driver on ice or you would die. Now you don't have to pump your brakes anymore." Snover also joked that programming is getting so abstract, developers will soon have to use Natal to "write programs through interpretative dance."
The key word here is experimental. As in it will never see the light of day other than to con people into thinking managed code can do more than it can. Which worked on you.
No kidding.
I suggest an alternate headline: "Old dogs have trouble learning new tricks!"
Or maybe: "Members of the 'High Priesthood of Technology' hate it when programming becomes easier!"
What really bugs me about old-school programmers saying this is it influences some of the younger guys, and they're frankly wrong. Except for the small amount of programmer doing kernel or embeddeded code, tools that manage their own memory are simply superior to those that don't. Tools that allow you to lay-out a GUI visually are superior to those that don't.
In short, if you're a programmer at Microsoft, and one of these codgers is trying to talk you into giving up C# and going back to C++, you tell him to get off YOUR lawn.
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Two things:
1) That's a language problem. Good languages (i.e. not C/C++) don't allow errors like that, or at least make them incredibly hard.
2) And that problem goes away when you're not using an IDE? Your magic compiler can somehow identify the exact line, but the evil IDE monsters confuse and beguile it! Right?
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