Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding
By Charles Petzold
Right, so on the one hand we now have hyperactive Intelisense, and code spitting visual designers making even the most lazy developer pretty darn productive. But on the other hand, due to simple human nature, even really good developers are starting "fuzz out" and cary less and less detailed information in their heads. You could make the argument that, with 60,000 methods in the core framework alone, developers are, by necessity, moving to the higher level of abstraction. Is this a good thing? Charles Petzold doesn’t think so.
I’m not sure I fully agree with him, but looking back it does seem to me that ever since intellisense became very accurate I have found that even with the startling increase in my own productivity Visual Studio’s emphasis on rapid development has only increased my dissatisfaction with my speed. It’s as if my performance doubled, but my expectations were simultaneously raised by an order of magnitude.
Ruminations on the Psychology and Aesthetics of Coding
By Charles Petzold
Right, so on the one hand we now have hyperactive Intelisense, and code spitting visual designers making even the most lazy developer pretty darn productive. But on the other hand, due to simple human nature, even really good developers are starting "fuzz out" and cary less and less detailed information in their heads. You could make the argument that, with 60,000 methods in the core framework alone, developers are, by necessity, moving to the higher level of abstraction. Is this a good thing? Charles Petzold doesn’t think so.
I’m not sure I fully agree with him, but looking back it does seem to me that ever since intellisense became very accurate I have found that even with the startling increase in my own productivity Visual Studio’s emphasis on rapid development has only increased my dissatisfaction with my speed. It’s as if my performance doubled, but my expectations were simultaneously raised by an order of magnitude.
posted by jshep at
10/27/2005 08:07:00 AM
