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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
An long and interesting rant by Charles Petzold.
Obviously this is mostly about the IDE side of things (seeing as VS is an IDE). Some of the features that VS provides are intended to overcome the huge size of the standard libraries, and you might argue this isn't really a language issue. At some level this is indeed a valid argument. However, I think we should pause every once in awhile and wonder whether better programming language abstractions might make modern programming - with GUIs, XML etc. - easier, and eliminate some of the need for huge libraries. In fact, one can argue that LINQ (Cw) is a step in this direction, as regards data access. It is also worth noting that when IDEs influence the way programming is done, they influence the way languages are used, and thus influence the design space. Programmers demand new language features partly as a response to their experience with the language as it is used in practice. Finally, the impact on teaching and learning programming shouldn't be overlooked. Students naturally want to produce cool GUI applications and use VS. If this makes it harder to introduce them to different programming techniques and languages (and I think it does), this can be highly problematic. Here are some choice quotes from Petzold (who also said that the whole history of new programming languages... for Windows has involved the struggle to reduce the windows hello-world program down to something small, sleek, and elegant):
To get IntelliSense to work right, not only must you code in a bottom-up structure, but within each method or property, you must also write you code linearly from beginning to end — just as if you were using that old DOS line editor, EDLIN. You must define all variables before you use them. No more skipping around in your code.
By Ehud Lamm at 2005-10-29 22:34 | Software Engineering | Teaching & Learning | other blogs | 19633 reads
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