>>61
Your well written retort, especially on /prog/, is welcome and appreciated.
If there's one thing I like to write, it's retorts.
I may be mischaracterizing the point of the article, but hardly the content. He shouldn't have rambled on about various other half-meditated complaints and got to the point.
It was originally a talk with a captive audience. But besides that, I found the wealth of specific examples and speculation rather than conclusions to be a welcome change from the polemics one often encounters in programming opinion pieces.
You could say that about the keyboard you use, the number of monitors you have, or the chair you sit in. A good programmer should already have constructed much of the code design using established patterns and concepts well before even sitting down with a computer. If you're really affected that much by a dumb IDE, you've got bigger problems.
You couldn't say your keyboard or chair leads you to work in a particular fashion, although you might be able to make an argument that extra monitors encourage a programmer to read more documentation. Regardless, the very point is that Visual Studio isn't a dumb IDE — it's a
smart IDE with ideas of its own. While I agree that in a perfect world, programmers would program in the mind then let it all spill out (then refine it), this is patently not the way that the average programmer does it. This type of programmer, while perhaps capable of adequate design work, will surrender to the studio. Many of them likely learned to program in Visual Studio, meaning that they never even
learned to program otherwise.
It's useless to talk merely about what programmers
ought to do when it's completely at odds with what they
will do, given a particular tool. While some programmers are perfectly willing, or even driven, to strike out on their own, most are more comfortable going with the flow, working as culture and environment dictate, just as most people are. Is it more productive to point out issues with unchanging human nature, or to point out issues with software suites, which can change rapidly if a motivated person is made aware of the problem?