Re: In regards to my giving up on programming?
- From: Dave <davidct1209@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2010 15:53:09 -0700
Thanks for posting that Jamal.
I think a better title for the article would have been "Does Visual
Studio and .Net Rot the Mind?". I, personally, love .Net + Visual
studio as you can write a Windows app at break neck speed and the
process of building/running is lightning fast.
However, for new comers, I can see why Petzold seemed so hesitant to
write a guide to winforms as opposed to full on development. I can
see how easy it would have been to drag a few controls around and even
adding a few event handlers to an app would have yielded a sense of
accomplishment, but if anything ever went wrong or if I was actually
serious about doing professional development that would have been a
hinderence. It's somewhat revealing to see that even Microsoft hasn't
adopted .Net for its serious revenue generating applications (Office,
IE, Windows, etc.). For that matter, most screen readers use
win32/C++/MFC/COM. .Net allows programmers to remain oblivious of
core Windows concepts as it does all of the heavy lifting, so that
when things go wrong, you have no idea what happened or even where to
start looking. It also skirts around the pure joy of designing or
seeing core algorithms implemented.
Having recently been coding mostly in C++/StL/COM, I can appreciate
how much work it takes to get low-level details right especially with
a big project; but with those struggles comes greater control,
performance, and cross-platform possibilities. Now, if I write a .Net
app, I'm conscious of what exactly occurs when I assign object
references or how much boxing/unboxing costs or using StringBuilder,
etc.
This isn't to say .Net is "bad", but for someone who wants the full
story on Windows development and not a watered down version more apt
for hobbiest, win32/C would be a great jumping off point as .Net
serves mostly as a wrapper for those legacy technologies (with the
noteable exception of WPF which is based on DirectX).
On 7/5/10, Jamal Mazrui <empower@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This reminds me of an article:
>
> Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
> Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding
> By Charles Petzold
>
> http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
>
> Jamal
>
>
> On 7/2/2010 7:49 PM, Jes wrote:
>> Ken wrote:
>> "You can get up and running much faster on a language like, python, or c
>> and
>> actually see results. Results is what matters when you start out
>> coding"...
>>
>> I couldn't agree more with that. The IDE is a lazy man's way to begin to
>> program. To me, any text book or college material which gives you a
>> prepackaged formula, claiming to teach you something isn't really doing
>> you any good and shouldn't even be used by the college. As an example, the
>> book I am using is "An Introduction to Programming with C plus plus, by
>> Diane Zak." Thank goodness they used programming, not coding. They only
>> show you the code you need to copy and paste into your IDE, which, in this
>> case, is Visual Studio. I like the way the book introduces new concepts of
>> the C plus plus language to you, but they fail to really get down into the
>> dirt with all of it. For example, they tell you what an algorithm is, and
>> they tell you the various procedures to start writing a program; 1,
>> analyzing a problem, 2, planning an algorithm, 3, desk-checking your
>> algorithm, etc. Basically, it just feels like I'm copying and pasting in a
>> bunch of code, into an IDE so I can pass a c
> ourse. Furthermore, when we finally have no errors in the code, the .exe
> opens up in a command prompt. They don't even help us build real genuine
> Windows apps, it's all console applications. I've always associated C plus
> plus with genuine Windows gui application development. What's wrong with
> this picture?
>> Jes, the proud man.
>>
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