Visual Studio Gets Achievements, Badges, Leaderboards

bonch writes "Microsoft has introduced a gamification plugin for Visual Studio that lets users win achievements and badges as they compete on leaderboards by writing code. The full list of achievements includes gems like 'Go To Hell' for using goto, and 'Potty Mouth' for using five different curses in one file. This is another example of Gamification, one of the latest trends to hit social media."

Comments

Possible badges for good code

[tucuxi]

I for one would find these badges nice:

• compiled without warnings (cumulative for "N times in a row")
• doxygen-compliant comment coverage (percentage-wise cumulative)
• safe programming practices (always compares constant == lvalue, initializes all values, ...)

On the other hand, IDEs like Netbeans and Eclipse are getting better and better at nagging users about such issues (and auto-generating code to fix many of them). Do we really need the badges?

Re:I've been trying to recover from decades of hat

[geekoid]

I'm many decades past 15 and this looks awesome.

If you stopped and looked around for moment instead of assume you know what's going on you would realize how powerful achievements are. There are many, many good outcomes to this. The biggest will be more knowledgeable and experience developers.

You can't have been around that long if you think this is MS Bob.
That said, MSBob had a great start, but someone future wife was put in charge and basically managed it to shit.