Do modern IDEs make us dumber?

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

by vorador • 18 years ago

30 37 18 years ago

charlespetzold.com

jacktasia• 18 years ago

They don't make us dumber...they do make it a bit harder to become smarter though, since they do so much for us.

shard• 18 years ago

Tl,dr. Anything interesting happen in this movie after Intellisense?

qqq• 18 years ago

Mixed Metaphor!!

fuzzy-waffle• 18 years ago

IDEs seem to be more a symptom of a programming environment that is poorly designed especially if your IDE is generating large amount of code for you. Perhaps that is what petzold was advocating if I could stand reading the talk in its entirety.

modoc3• 18 years ago

No. They (can) make us more productive.

When you're working with a large number of source files, the ability to have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation means you can write working code more quickly.

The ability to refactor/rename across an entire project with a click of a mouse means I'm much more likely to refactor as the code evolves, leading to higher quality, more readable, more extendable code. Seeing class hierarchy trees with one click, jumping to view the source of a method I'm using, remote debugging totally integrated with my source code, etc... is all really valuable.

Sure, drag-and-dropping everything in some IDEs means you're missing a lot of the core stuff in programming, but at least for me, I am more productive using Eclipse than I was using Emacs and the shell.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

> When you're working with a large number of source files, the ability to have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation means you can write working code more quickly.

I think his point is broader than that - he's arguing that IDEs encourage/are symptomatic of/cause bloat of the APIs and encourage bloat in other areas (e.g. generated code).

However, I think this article misses a trick by not mentioning functional programming.

FP reduces the surface area of many APIs considerably. It also "fixes" all the code generation issues with a much more elegant solution (i.e. macros).

newsycaccount2• 18 years ago

Funny, most programers who make heavy use of macros heavily rely on IDE-like features such as macro-expansion.

maxwell2• 18 years ago

IDEs appear to compensate for language design flaws which decrease productivity in the first place.

sofal3• 18 years ago

There are both kinds of developers. I always thought Oliver Steele did a good job of explaining this here:

http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides

Here's my take:

The ability to write in a language that doesn't require excessive amounts of boilerplate code means I'm much more likely to refactor as the code evolves. Seeing an algorithm on one page, localizing and separating the logic cleanly with higher level constructs, easily translating the intuitions in my head to a coded solution, being able to dive into any part of the code without getting lost in the redundancy and residue of IDE vomit, etc... is all really valuable. Getters and setters that take up more than one very short annotation are eyesores, and the mere act of coughing them up into the code was never a bottleneck to programming speed no matter how bloated they get.

The act of automatically renaming classes or variables, along with all the other code-shoveling refactoring support that IDEs provide is a miniscule subset of what refactoring is really about. The real refactoring work is done in your head. You need to look at the code and comprehend it in ways that aren't obvious, so that you can reorganize it to be simpler or maybe extendable. This kind of work cannot be done by an IDE; however, it can be aided by using a nice expressive language that gets to the point and doesn't distract you from the problem.

When it comes down to building, deploying, and automation of other menial tasks, I'm not stuck with what the IDE developers give me. A good language is like putty in my hands. An IDE locks me down and cumbers me, giving me little in return other than a graphical debugger and quick syntax help. Once you have mastered the command line, it becomes painfully obvious what the IDE cannot do. An IDE is a static cockpit with lots of cool doodads and buttons. I can make my own doodads and buttons and they will do exactly what I wish and they will do it exactly how I wish.

I am a language maven.

matstc• 18 years ago

> The act of automatically renaming classes or variables, along with all the other code-shoveling refactoring support that IDEs provide is a miniscule subset of what refactoring is really about.

I've heard this argument many times and I can't quite understand it. Even if the few supported operations like rename/pull up/inline/extract are only a subset of all possible refactorings, I still do these things multiple times an hour. I want them to be automated. I hate bloated IDEs just as much as the next guy, but I do miss automated refactorings when in vim or emacs.

azanar2• 18 years ago

>The real refactoring work is done in your head.

This has totally been my experience. Moving a method or variable up or down in the inheritance tree, extracting part of a method, inlining method calls: all of this is architectural refactoring. I've found the much of my refactoring time isn't spent in moving methods around and modifying signatures; it is spent in modifying the algorithms and data organization. Not organization in the sense of whether variable belongs in sub- or super-class, but in the sense of whether some subset of data should belong in a particular class, or some new delegate class I construct. That new delegate class might not be a subset of the class I'm splitting apart, so requires more than just some automated extraction process. I can't help but create a mental picture of all of this as a sort of architectural autopilot -- it can handle making minor course and altitude corrections, but still expects you to have thought about things before pressing the 'engage' button.

modoc3• 18 years ago

Maybe it's a language difference, or something else. I write J2EE apps. I don't want to start a language war, but personally I really like Java, and people like paying me to build stuff in it, so let's take that as a given. Also, seeing that the big popular IDEs are Eclipse (mostly used for Java) and MS's VisualStudio (C++, C#, etc...) the context of the discussion seems to be those languages where there is a mature, popular, IDE available.

The projects I work on are often pretty big (e-commerce websites for Fortune 500 type companies), and while an algorithm may live on one viewable screen of one class, a single business process or requirement will almost always span multiple JSPs and many classes. An add to cart action will need to check inventory, shipping rules based on hazardous flags on the SKU, shipping options and costs based on the customer's zip code, run through a whole pricing pipeline to apply coupons, discounts, BOGO type specials, and so on. Therefore to write that, or later alter or debug it, I will need to navigate through multiple files, to specific methods. And IDE means I can go directly to the source a method I call with one mouse click or key-combo. This is faster than finding the file, opening it, and finding the correct method (even more so when you can't just search by method name due to overloading).

I don't know exactly what you mean by "residue of IDE vomit". My IDE doesn't write code (with the exception of getters/setters). I do. Maybe Visual Studio does write lots of code for you, I wouldn't know. Real refactoring always starts in your head, no matter what tool or lack of tool you're using. You always plan it out in your head. It's just a matter of when its time to make the changes, are you searching for names to edit in 20 files by hand or not.

Maybe there's a difference in what we're talking about when we say IDE. In my opinion:

Dreamweaver = bad HTML IDE: because it lets you create page with dragging and dropping, so you don't actually understand how markup works, or how a dom tree is parsed, and it generates tons of awful HTML code behind the scenes.

Eclipse = good Java IDE: I write the Java code myself, but the IDE makes common tasks faster, and provides intelligent auto-complete, which means that I don't have to memorize every method name and parameter order of every class in the J2EE + Framework of choice stack.

I guess I feel that most of your complaints about IDEs don't apply to (or at least line up with my experience) writing J2EE apps in Eclipse. I used to use Emacs, bash scripts, and Ant, for years so I know what the alternative is.

You say an IDE is like a static cockpit, but in Eclipse at least it's pretty easy to make your own doodads and buttons that do whatever you want, or use the doodads someone else already created.

For me, an IDE is like toolchest with a little robot attached. It keeps all my tools in one place, so they aren't scattered all over my garage, I can add whatever custom tools I want to it, and the robot knows that when I pick a 18mm socket up, I'll almost certainly want the 1/2" ratchet next, and hands it to me, instead of me having to go dig through the stack of ratchets to find it. And if I'm using a torque wrench, the robot calls out the correct torques for the bolts/studs I'm working on at the moment.

The robot doesn't work on the car, and the toolchest doesn't spit out assembled engine blocks, but they mean I spend less time hunting for tools around my garage, and more time working on the car.

azanar2• 18 years ago

Productivity is a difficult thing to measure, because the units people use aren't consistent. I'm going to try to respond using the metric of productivity I've become most comfortable with, which is quanta of robust functionality per unit time. By robust, I mean it is not fragile or rigid to future changes within both itself and dependencies.

In this sense of productive, IDEs can be quite detrimental in careless hands. IDE can make developers more prolific, generating very quickly blocks of code that perform particular tasks, but I've also found that it can cultivate a more manufacturing method of coding, where developers just bounce on the '.' and tab keys and glue bits of 'sensed' method calls together. It makes development fast, and that means any productivity metric based on providing code meeting specified requirements is satisfied swiftly. It also means that the developer spends far less time thinking about individual blocks of code; this can have very deleterious effects. A single line might consist of 12 method calls strung together, because the developer didn't take the time to go back and assess things like readability. A particular method might calculate the incorrect result when passed data it wasn't originally designed for, rather that throwing an exception or gracefully degrading its functionality. A method or class definition might likewise make unreasonable assumptions about dependencies, requiring a large amount of rewriting; rewriting which could have been avoided if the developer had taken a few minutes to step back and examine the implications of their work, and how the design could change to make the code clearer and simpler.

To be clear, I am not blaming IDEs for careless, fragile code. What I am saying is that IDEs can be a magnifier for carelessness, allowing a developer with a proclivity for banging out code as fast as possible without regard for quality to do so much faster. What time they spend reaching for the documentation for a particular class or framework would give their mind a chance to think about what they are working on, and possibly come up with a more long-term workable solution to what they are building. I'm not saying it's a panacea; I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not totally opposed to artificially slowing down developers who would otherwise write code faster than they can reason about it. I suppose the other solution is just to identify them as careless, and remove them from the project.

I also worry about your dismissive stance toward the “core stuff of programming.” I’ve found it is this core stuff that makes for the simpliest, future-proof code, because the core stuff allows for reasoning about design, not just about functionality.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

> have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation

You can do all this from Vim.

dazzawazza• 18 years ago

Good and bad programmrs use IDEs. Good and bad programmers use text editors. Bad programmers use IDEs as a crutch, supporting their otherwise poor programming skills.

It's simplistic to say that IDEs make us dumber. Auto-completion can lead to a vagueness about code structure but refactoring tools can greatly aid programmers to complete repetitive error prone tasks.

sofal3• 18 years ago

An IDE does a great job at helping you generate and manage repetitive code. The problem is that it doesn't help you read and understand repetitive code.

The fact that a repetitive and error prone task needs to be done at all is sometimes (not always, I acknowledge) a sign that your code is redundant and, well, crappy. I think it's a good idea to step back and decide whether the redundancy is legitimate. An IDE doesn't encourage that kind of thinking. Remember, someone after you has to go and read that code, and the IDE is not going to hide the redundancy from him or her. At the end of the day someone is scratching their head and staring at a whole lot of text.

msg• 18 years ago

I have grown to hate the MS family of programs's insistence that Daddy knows best, and I must turn off the magic on a case-by-case basis.

I noticed a big difference when I transitioned from Visual Studio/Netbeans type coding to Emacs. I stopped hunting through class hierarchies and started, you know, actually learning the libraries I needed to use. Emacs lets me be the magician.

I haven't programmed using XAML, but it reminds me of the .ui file produced by Qt Designer, which I've edited by hand at times.

snprbob862• 18 years ago

Hopefully, if the library designers are doing their jobs, you aren't hunting through class hierarchies. Instead, you should be falling into a pit of success.

That is, some path to your solution should always be immediately obvious and that simplest path should always be the correct one. Clearly an unachievable goal in the general sense, but surprisingly doable overall in statically typed languages. One example: I know I have to call A.F(B), so I know that I need to construct B, which offers B.ctor(X) and B.ctor(Y), but I don't have an X, so clearly I need B.ctor(Y) ... etc. IntelliSense would have pointed you right to it!

I used to have a tendency to thumb through IntelliSense (and sometimes I still do!), but have taken to reading the docs before starting because most of the libraries I interact with are just too complex! The real problem is, that the majority of code that I consume isn't documented at all anyway, so hunting through the class hierarchies (or code directly) is all I've got.

For the record, my tools are: C/C++ = Visual Studio and Source Insight; C# = Visual Studio with Resharper; Java = IntelliJ IDEA; Python = Wing; Javascript = gggrrrrrrrr; XML, HTML = Notepad2; Other text files = Notepad2 or Visual Studio; whichever has the focus :-)

ajross• 18 years ago

One might submit that if you were to learn a single editor and use it for all your tasks, you might not only be more productive at each of them but your answer to an editor for Javascript might be something other than "ggrrrrr".

hs3• 18 years ago

from my observations, OOP style programmer tends to rely most on IDE while FP style the least

that might reflect the relative dumbness of the two

nradov• 18 years ago

No, it's because there are few IDEs available for FP languages. As FP languages become more popular the IDEs will appear.

hs3• 18 years ago

i'm pointing to something deeper, because of high level abstractions, FP codes tend to be short -> can fit in one head; thus, IDE is less essential

no amount of popularity can change that

gaius• 18 years ago

It's the other way 'round. IDEs appeared because languages like Java require so much scaffolding. Why should I even have to see generated code, let alone write it, that's the compiler's job! Automation (which the exception of simple stuff like paran matching) doesn't add much to succinct languages because there isn't much in your code that isn't directly addressing the problem you want to solve, and that has to come from inside your own head.

maxwell2• 18 years ago

Even so, I wouldn't want to write Lisp without at least paren matching.

hs3• 18 years ago

yes, i use vim and vi text editors for lisp paren matching is essential

it's not like i'm advocating writing code using cli or sed

newsycaccount2• 18 years ago

Writing Lisp without an even more IDE-like feature, macro-expansion, would be almost as painful.

lsb• 18 years ago

I really love the DrScheme IDE. You can see the values that your functions are passing each other, and I've prototyped some code using Scheme and it was a really seamless experience.

michaelneale• 18 years ago

Does watching TV make us dumber? Video games? Questions like this don't have an answer but can be an interesting discussion.

I guess I consider emacs ad IDE (or at the very least toolkit to build a personalised IDE). What about smalltalk? I don't think most would think of that as "dumbing things down" yet it really invented all the good things that IDEs have ?

raamdev• 18 years ago

As someone who started learning C a few months ago, it was comforting to hear a 20+ year veteran programmer say that coding in C made him "feel like a real programmer again".

axod• 18 years ago

It'd be interesting to see a wide spread study on this. I've yet to meet a good programmer that uses an IDE, but that could just be an anomaly.

known• 18 years ago

IDE = Code re-use

sanj• 18 years ago

I think that there's a forcing function with using a non-IDE environment that makes me, at least, write better code. I have to navigate it and understand it without (easily) jumping between files/methods/objects.

For me, that leads to better organized and better encapsulated code.

hsuresh• 18 years ago

Yes, if you are a beginner. I have seen many folks who start learning Java with IDEs struggle with issues like classpath. So, at least as a beginner of any new language, i would work with just a good editor (emacs/textmate) instead of an IDE.

bhiggins• 18 years ago

Code generation is bad if you ever have to edit the code generated, under any circumstances (the qualification excludes (good) compilers).

I like features like IntelliSense (when they work properly). I mean really, if you don't like features like this then perhaps you should consider removing auto-indent from your editor -- perhaps it's making you too lazy. As for me, I'd rather not remember API minutiae if I can help it.

That's not to say I don't learn APIs. I do and it's important to understand a system completely. But sometimes I forget the order of arguments to some random function.

Do modern IDEs make us dumber?

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