Slashdot Mirror
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."
Advanced developers who learned how to code on what would be considered bare bones IDEs don't feel the need to use tools that are meant to let low level developers produce functional GUI applications without having to dedicate tons of hours.
News at 11!
Yes, in some respects, programming is becoming easier and more unqualified people are able to do it.
But I think that these guys are really missing the boat. The closer the programming environment can come to providing domain-relevant expression tools to the user, the better they will be able to create programs that fit their domain.
In addition, content these days is a form of programming. Whether it is HTML/CSS or word processing or spreadsheets, the distinct line between what is a program and what is pure data is blurred beyond recognition. So a programming language for interpretive dance would probably find the Natal very useful.
"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."
Might have been more appropriate to compare it in that people in the high performance arena (nascar) don't like antilock brakes because of their limits and the separation you get from your task at hand. (you lose your "feel for the road")
Tho I'm a little strangely biased, I miss the days of assembly, when 10k was a LOT of code to write to solve a problem, thing ran at blindingly fast speed with almost no disk or memory footprint. Nowadays, Hello World is a huge production in itself. 97% of today's coders don't have any idea what they've missed out on and just accept what they've got. Even someone that understands the nerf tools like VB at a lower level can get sooo much more out of them. I recall taking someone's crypto code in VB and producing a several thousand-fold speed boost because of my understanding of how VB was translating things. They didn't know what to say, they'd just accepted that what they were doing was going to be dog slow. (and unfortunately the users are also falling under the same hypnosis)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
because the modern Microsoft development tools need that infernal Dotnet library to be loaded and then when it gets messes up any software that depends on it does not work.
Indeed. One of my PCs has a broken '.Net framework' which can't be fixed without a complete reinstall of the operating system: even Microsoft's own 'completely obliterate every last trace the bloody thing' uninstaller isn't enough to remove all the traces which prevent it from reinstalling properly. As a result, a lot of new software simply will not run.
Fortunately I do most of my useful work on Linux or Solaris these days so not being able to run random Windows software is no big deal, but '.Net' is such a monstrosity that it makes 'DLL Hell' look good in comparison; if even Microsoft can't fix it when it breaks, what chance do users have?
I just realized that I am now committed to the proposition that Perl "tries to spoonfeed you." I am not sure this is a good position to be in ;-)
do they use vim or emacs now?
Only one of these guys said anything about not liking to use an IDE. I use IDEs to write assembler language for microcontrollers at work every day. Sure I could do it in an editor as well but I much prefer the graphical debugger and simulator of my IDEs as being able to see all the dozens control registers' and fuses' bits graphically during the execution of each instruction is easier for my mind to wrap itself around than my screen littered in hex or ones and zeros, at least sometimes. That said, my assembler's emitted machine code is no different than if it wrote it in Vim and then ran the command line based build tools, which are the same thing my GUI runs when I press the associated F-key.
So the IDEs really have nothing to do with the so called "designers" you see in Visual Studio. And yes, its true that no developer who was serious about maintaining a multi-year product could do it via the designers before, you just had no control over WTF was going on. Now with WPF and xaml you finally can use the designers in a maintainable fashion, but it's a bit too little, too late for most developers to care. You can write pure Windows code in C as a makefile project(so you have clear control over the build, even to the point of a different toolchain like GNU) just as well in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE as with Vim and the command prompt tools. It's just a matter of if the IDE at that point gets in the way more than it helps.
The biggest posers I worked with used Visual Studio. The best group of programmers I worked with used text editor. That group could code rings around VS. The best of the best of them used vi.
This is absurd. Visual Studio, Eclipse, Vim, these are fucking *tools*. People use tools, not because the people are better, but because they find the tools useful.
Me, if I'm writing code for Unix or my DS, yeah, I prefer a maximized xterm, GNU Screen, and Vim. But if I'm writing a .NET application, I'm gonna use Visual Studio, as it's a very powerful development environment (doubly so when coupled with ViEmu).
OTOH, people who judge others based on their choice of IDE? Those people *are* tools...
The original article and the summary both come of as rather smug to me. The truth of the matter is that you need both low-level nitty-gritty programming and high-level programming. It depends on what you're using it for.
Think of it this way. You have people who make pipes. You know, the kind used in plumbing. Fittings, too. And they're very good at it. If you take your average house builder and try to get him to make a pipe, he'll be hopelessly bad at it. But you know what those guys who build houses are good at? Putting the pipes together in meaningful ways to get what they need (i.e. building a house) done. Take a guy who's brilliant at making pipes and fittings and try to get him to build a house. Yeah, not such a superstar now.
It's the same with programmers. Tell someone who is very good at writing low-level code, "I need a killer efficient compiler." Give them enough time, and they can churn it out and make it wicked optimized. Tell them, "I need a new type of control that works in this specific way and with crucial efficiency," and they're your guys. Tell them, "I need an new application entirely from scratch that can process my specific business logic, it needs to look and feel like a standard Windows application, it needs to be easy for end users to figure out and work with, and we need a working version in a couple of weeks," and they'll probably laugh at you. Yet that's what those people they're looking down on, the people developing with higher-level abstracted languages, are doing every day.
In my experience, competence != usefulness. They're not opposites, mind you, but it takes both types. It takes the people who work with the low-level nitty-gritty stuff, and it takes the people who use what they churn out to actually accomplish real-world productive things. One isn't smarter, one isn't better, neither should be looked down upon. Both are necessary.
Yeah, because IDEs don't have lists of errors, and double clicking on the error doesn't take you right to the line where the error is. It's so much easier to hunt through random code than to look at the little red squiggle on the line the IDE pointed out to you.
I'd call you an idiot but that would be insulting to idiots.
Our programmers are getting a bad rep because of our coding-for-weenies tradition. Can you please run an article that makes Microsoft programmers look like total badasses?
XOXOXO
-Steve B.
I hate Microsoft more than anyone
See, being subjected to IDEs has lowered your ability of detecting faulty code. You're basically saying A > A since this "anyone" includes "you" too. ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Yeah, really. Senior Engineers disagree with company marketing strategy ...
Who said that "graphical programming" is company marketing strategy today? Oh, sorry, it's another kdawson story; you expected any facts here? Let me explain then.
Anyone who deals with .NET tools knows that there had been a recent shift back towards code. For example, WinForms development was too tedious without visual drag&drop form editor, but WPF markup is best hand-coded, just like HTML (VS provides a visual editor, too, but hardly anyone uses it for anything except quick preview). Or what used to be called "typed datasets" - also very designer-centric, but with LINQ2SQL and Entity Framework, again, most people stick to writing code and mappings in XML by hand.
In fact, it's easy to find out that much if you just look up the names mentioned in TFA. For example, who is Don Box? He's working on Microsoft "Oslo" project, next-gen modeling platform which was hyped back on PDC2008, and all Microsoft managers in the division blogged on how it's the next big thing etc. And the main difference of that platform from the existing "DSL" tools in VS2008? Oslo is centered around text-based DSLs, and comes with a Emacs-like editor which can handle them.
In short, developers of the new tools for Microsoft development platform - which are fully backed by marketing - criticize some aspects of the previous generation of tools. Surprise, eh?
But go ahead and ask them what they use to edit C# code that they write, and I bet you'll hear "why, VS of course".
Then there's Jeffrey's comment on .NET. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with it, and if you RTFA, you'll see that he is an architect for PowerShell - a very high-level scripting/shell language built on top of .NET! To interpret his comment as a criticism of managed, when he is in fact the one "pushing" for it via the tech he works on, is rather disingenuous.
The real reason why they don't use Visual Studio is far more prosaic -- the build environment of most of Microsoft products does not support the Visual Studio project files. Their products are built using a system called CoreXT -- basically a set of binary tools and scripts cobbled together by build engineers and developers over the past decade or so. CoreXT uses a lot of different crap, make, perl, compilers, etc, etc., and all tools and SDKs are checked in and versioned. The upside is that you can roll back your Source Depot (Microsoft's own flavor of Perforce) enlistment to an earlier date and be sure things will build exactly the same way, and once you enlist, you get repeatable, isolated build environment where you can guarantee the correctness of versions for all tools, compilers and libraries (Java developer's wet dream, even though they don't know it). The downside is that you have to maintain the makefiles by hand, and you can't use Visual Studio, because there are no project files checked in, and even if there are, most people don't use them and they are not updated, so you can count on them being broken.
I did a lot of my coding in either Notepad2, or in a separate project in Visual Studio against a test harness emulating the rest of the project (what Enterprise Java types call a "mock"). Some folks used Ultra Edit or vi, or EMACS. For some just a bare Notepad did the trick. Some stuck with Visual Studio, which in their case was just a glorified Notepad with autoindent since it doesn't support build or Intellisense if you don't have a project file.
Yes, it's an enormous waste of time, and yes, it was painful. But CoreXT is so integrated into the rest of the dev pipeline that replacing it with something else in a large product is a major, destabilizing endeavor that is bound to undo at least some of the work around gated check-in infrastructure, test infrastructure, automated deployment infrastructure and god knows what else, so few teams ever attempt it. Now naturally, DevDiv eats their own dogfood, so they were one of the first teams to switch completely to MSBuild. It took something like a year in their case, they did it gradually, from the leaves down the tree. I'm sure if they had a choice, they would be using CoreXT to this day though, and fighting with incremental build issues. :-)
Recently, a few more teams have adopted MSBuild. They can actually open their entire projects in Visual Studio and rebuild them. If they have test infrastructure deployed on the side, some of them can even test the product without waiting for it to deploy. So I predict that as more and more teams adopt MSBuild (this in itself could take another decade easily), these "senior" folks will come around to appreciate its benefits. It's awfully handy when you can set a conditional breakpoint on your local box and step through things.
But the OP may be right if it is statistically true (I don't know that it is) that there exists high correlations between "good" programmers preferring a text editor and/or "posers" preferring Visual Studio.
I'll buy the former, but absolutely *not* the latter.
Coding with a simple text editor, make/gcc/etc, and gdb implies a fundamental set of skills: familiarity and comfort on the command-line, ability to (presumably) write and invoke Makefiles, ability to use gdb (which, let's face it, ain't pretty for a newcomer), and so forth. So it stands to reason that there's a greater chance such an individual has the skills necessary to write decent code (also known as "trial by fire"), as a poorer developer would likely be scared away.
But I find it very difficult to believe that, given a population of VS users, there's a disproportionate number of crappy developers (ie, that the ratio of skilled to unskilled developers exceeds the ratio in the software developer population at large). A weak developer will obviously use any tools that make the job of writing code less daunting, and a good IDE definitely fits in that category. And a strong developer will use whatever tool makes their job easier, and guess what? VS is a *damn* good tool, particularly if you're targeting the .NET stack.
So I'd would say this: A developer that's happy using a simple text editor/compiler/debugger combo has a greater than average chance of being a good developer. But you can assume nothing about a developer who chooses an integrated IDE over the aforementioned environment if given the choice.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that any developer who actively *shuns* IDEs without good reason (and, BTW, simple familiarity is a good reason... mindless elitism, however, is not) deserves as much skepticism as one who isn't capable of using the editor/compiler/debugger environment, as they're expressing dogmatic tendencies that can be deeply counterproductive in the work environment.