Does Visual Studio rot the mind?

http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

by verve • 15 years ago

4 2 15 years ago

adityab• 15 years ago

<trolling> VS is 'powerful', but Vim + BufExplorer + Project add-on + Taglist + grep steals the show. (I hate emacs). </trolling>

I especially hate it when schools and universities in my country (almost all the ones I know) make students use Visual Studio in CS 101. Most of these students struggle when confronted with a UNIX system where they actually have to use the shell to do tasks. Giving beginners raw components of a system to deal with rather than everything bundled together in point-and-click interfaces goes a long way in cultivating the hacker mindset.

dextorious• 15 years ago

"""I especially hate it when schools and universities in my country (almost all the ones I know) make students use Visual Studio in CS 101. Most of these students struggle when confronted with a UNIX system where they actually have to use the shell to do tasks."""

I'm a UNIX fan myself (cut my teeth on Sun OS back in the day, and use OSX/Ubuntu today), but that could also be interpreted as a failure of the UNIX system, though.

If:

1) the end result is that same (produce a program that does something I want) and 2) Visual Studio makes it easier

then why do we accept to go back to the harder way?

That should only happen by CHOICE, i.e because to get some specific benefits of not using an IDE, etc.

But if "they actually have to use the shell to do tasks" and they "struggle with it", this means that UNIX does not give them the option to bypass the IDE by choice, but by necessity.

"""Giving beginners raw components of a system to deal with rather than everything bundled together in point-and-click interfaces goes a long way in cultivating the hacker mindset."""

Perhaps, but I could care less about that kind of "hacker mindset", which I prefer to call "the tinkerer mindset".

For me the important thing is to work in INTERESTING and/or USEFUL problems, not play with the "raw components" and feel fulfilled by non-work like setting up a development environment.

Anything that removes the distance from thought to actual problem-specific code is nice.

Does Visual Studio rot the mind?

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