8 ms·

I can't tell if you're making a joke or not.

by doomspork 11y ago

thenewwazoo 11y ago
Not. MS makes really, really killer tools.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Not really, they make okay tools that are extensible enough. Visual Studio is a great example of this. You basically need ReSharper and a hundred other addons to get anything serious done. Just try using VS for C++ development, even the primitive Qt Creator tops it.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I imagine you never used VC++ debugger...
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      I have quite regularly, but I'm just as comfortable in that of Eclipse, Qt Creator, gdb, or even binary debuggers like IDA's or OllyDbg for reverse engineering. I don't see it as a major advantage over any other platform. It's a simple GUI debugger, nothing fancy. Am I missing something?
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        - Parallel watches of multiple threads variables - Visualization of threads and their stacks contents - Customizable breakpoints in many different ways (conditions, hit count, only on special thread) - Visualization of tasks (PPL) - Its STL visualizers are much nicer to use and customize than any of the alternatives - Selective control of threads execution behavior - Re-execution of code blocks - Ability to perform code navigation across .obj and .dll files without access to source code (only on Architect version) Yeah sure, gdb can have some of this stuff, it even allows for some kind of C/C++ REPL, but I won't be debugging parallel code with it.
        ultramancool 11y ago
        I suppose it depends on what you're used to and what features you actually need. When debugging I'm most often able to solve things with a few breakpoints, a stack dump and little else. The situations where that's insufficient for me are few and far between. When I'm debugging some code using old threading paradigms I more often than not just break out helgrind on it, which often reveals threading problems instantly. It's unavailable on Windows though.
      - vvanders 11y ago
        You lost me at Eclipse being decent...
        ske4286 11y ago
        You got that right! The Eclipse comment got me to stop here…signup, and write. I have been a Wintel developer for 25 years. I make a modest 6-figure income writing C#/MSSQL apps (after years of (Clipper, C, C++ and Delphi) that run large businesses. I mainly write multi-threaded server apps (most from the ground up, not WCF/SOAP) but I do still venture into the GUI work and even WPF/MVVM these days. I prefer MSSQL over Oracle any day, no comparison for 99% of what is needed out there. I love Hyper-V and VMWare (even when the Linux-lineage rears its head). My server in the basement is loaded with 140TB of very redundant storage. So, not the overage scrip kiddie who picked up this computer stuff last year. I completely gave up on Linux and any OpenSource development tools a few years ago, my personality and mind (of lack of) just couldn’t deal with it. It is completely frustrating to deal with almost-no-docs, partial thoughts of most users, buzzwords, short-hand, almost no attention to detail, and often from guys living in mom's basement, that have no need to generate output and earn a paycheck. I know that sounds harsh, but it is based on my experience with software development. I tried to cope with the Linux ecosystem for 10 years, it had to stop. It does, (or did) take days to install the completely unfocused IDE Eclipse and the Android SDK (Java itself to a lesser degree). People (I will call them “enthusiasts”) with lots of time, and little experience writing maintainable software, might enjoy the challenge - but I called it hell – I could give endless examples of zero-docs or absolutely wrong examples, docs and walk-throughs. Almost every doc I ever found on setting up Linux-ish (servers) or Android dev environments, etc. was completely full of errors, and the user community seemed to love their walk through their fields of mines. And I believe that is because the authors/users can get away it - production and earning is not key, playing and killing time seems to be the focus. This is fine I guess, but not for me. I must provide value to my customers/employers and write software that is maintainable. MS and VS allow me to do this with relative ease. MS has its faults, and I can list bugs in Windows that may never be fixed. Look at the Storage Spaces mess. Look at awesome ZFS (I mean that) – and only 1 PhD required to implement and properly maintain it under Linux, with storage beyond a minimal size. Look at the nightmare of Linux, storage controllers, trying to figure out what drive has what serial #, and is attached to what port, CLI and Gerp Hell. I bet FreeNAS still forces someone into spending a day to get all the apps required to pipe and redirect and Grep 20 apps, just right (oops the doc was wrong again) to find the one bad drive and drive serial#. MS with all its faults, smiles at this kind of mess. They usually improve on this, although I can’t say Storage Spaces is an example of this. It is my strong opinion (but I haven’t had the pleasure in doing) that all one needs to do to support my point, is take a group of average to above-average users/people and give them the mission of getting a dev environment setup to take some input from a user, open a socket and send that data somewhere. All Linux attempts will fail (with hostile screaming involved), most MS VS C# attempts will succeed (with minimal cursing). It really is that simple to demonstrate. One can play around with horrible docs and horrible tools or one can express their thoughts and solutions and earn a paycheck (if you're into that kind of thing). And for real comedy, ask those same test subject to setup an SMB server, in Linux and in Windows. I think you get my point, if you are not the 1 in 1000 Linux users that knows how to do that. Nothing makes me happier than Win10 IoT Core on Raspberry. I like Arduino, I use it when I have/need to, Netduino was OK but hit its limits, but I now, in 2015, I have a rock-solid IDE and C# at my fingertips, and Raspberry and Minnowboard, my higher-level projects will now be a breeze to implement. I am sure I will experience some pain but MS always gets it together for the developers. We are all of course doing different things for different reasons. I like to build home automation solutions for myself and friends (not commercially). So my Win10 IoT Core vs. Linux views come from that limited slant. I am not wanting to argue, that happens everywhere, I simply wanted to share my point of view as I remember my Eclipse Android SDK nightmares of a few years ago. We can completely disagree on some or all of this and still enjoy the comments on this thread. I smile and laughed at some of the comments here. Fun stuff. Good luck.
  - thenewwazoo 11y ago
    I used VS for C++ development professionally, and thought it was really great. Still do, in fact. I still haven't ever used anything that has a smooth and tightly-integrated edit-build-run-debug cycle. MS' documentation is (and always has been) top-notch, and hopping from code to doc and back again is easy enough to be fun. The platform sucks, of course, but if I could run MSVC++ on Linux, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      I do too, but I also use Qt Creator and Eclipse for writing C++ on RTOSes and I really don't think VS is anything special. I will agree with you about the documentation, with few exceptions MS documentation is some of the best written. But this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap. The piss poor code editing tools in VC++ irk me more than anything, I have to say that I feel like it's the worst of these platforms. Resharper for C++ is coming though, so maybe that'll change my mind.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
        * this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap* When I started Android development, the quality of documentation was so far below what I was used to from Microsoft that it hurt. If not for StackOverflow I would probably have given up and switched to Microsoft's mobile platform. Besides that, I'm not impressed by IntelliJ. Not even a little bit. I am however, vastly impressed by Visual Studio and all the IDE's that are based on it.
        ultramancool 11y ago
        The Android docs and Java docs are actually quite good though IMO. Is there somewhere in particular you felt they were lacking? You want to see some poorly documented stuff, check out BouncyCastle's "lightweight API" or OpenSceneGraph. Great libraries, but figuring them out is a serious investment.
        11y ago
  - fsloth 11y ago
    I'm left wondering what's the latest Visual Studio version you are familiar with. 2013 and 2015 are becoming pretty good - out of the box. I'm using visual studio nearly daily for C++, nothing wrong with it (except it lacked vim binding for which - there is an extension.)
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      The lack of basic C++ development features like "go to implementation", "add to header", automatic updating of prototypes or even the most basic refactoring tools like moving definitions, extracting functions, if I'm remembering correctly it didn't even have rename... yeah it drove me away pretty easily.
      - cobalt 11y ago
        VS 2013 and 2015 have added at least most of these features and if you really want some of that more fancy stuff, as said above, there is Resharper
- tpio 11y ago
  On a really, really shitty platform without a package manager and a decent CLI.
  - cobalt 11y ago
    um, really shitty platform i nwhat regard? Also, VS has had a package manager for a while and Powershell is more than capable
    - socceroos 11y ago
      I don't understand the people who compare PowerShell to a CLI on Unix/Linux. They're worlds apart and not even comparable. PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules - but those APIs are pretty good when they do exist. Unix/Linux CLI is a core set of tools that get you at literally everything you could want and give you unbounded power and flexibility. Worlds apart.
      - UK-AL 11y ago
        "PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules " Bullshit. It's engineering rule that all Microsoft products have all the admin capabilities exposed via powershell. Most admin gui's are now simply a call to a powershell command. You can pipe, and redirect input/output just like unix shells.
        tacos 11y ago
        Microsoft fanboy here (and OP of this sub-thread). PowerShell is a great example of how the two camps never meet in the middle. The syntax is mind-numbingly stupid. Also it's a scripting language not a shell -- but if they called it PowerScript people would just make fun of it for being bad Python. The syntax is hideous. And let's not talk about the shell itself which -- dear lord. Meanwhile Unix folk will never realize how much time they waste with broken scripts that have three sets of nested escaped quotes just so they can get text from one place to another -- even though "plain text is everything" hasn't really solved problems in a robust fashion since the 80s. Add in six different variations on regular expressions, a couple Python 2 vs 3 wars, endless battles of how to handle service startup, and the the fact that basic tools like sed and grep are stuck in some BSD never-never land on the Mac and you've got yourself a real mess. So when you're writing a script to move users, mailboxes and databases around? Maybe that PowerShell ain't so verbose after all. Better to type a little more now than deal with the pissed-off VP with an umlaut in his name later.
tacos 11y ago
I really wish I could show about 70% of the Windows knuckleheads a few Linux tools. And I really wish about half of Hacker News would spend twenty minutes with Visual Studio and Azure. Both sides have no idea what is possible. And, no. No joke.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  I see it as a problem with people not being open to a shift in how to get things done. You even see it within Windows development, like the crowd who argue you can't get anything done without ReSharper. People get used to doing something one way, and any other way is seen as inferior.
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  Show me the Linux tools.
  - tacos 11y ago
    This will get buried here and is worthy of a separate thread. But... what are the "gateway drugs" for a Windows-centric dev? A Linux-centrix dev? For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit. On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.

I can't tell if you're making a joke or not.

thenewwazoo 11y ago

Not. MS makes really, really killer tools.

ultramancool 11y ago
Not really, they make okay tools that are extensible enough. Visual Studio is a great example of this. You basically need ReSharper and a hundred other addons to get anything serious done. Just try using VS for C++ development, even the primitive Qt Creator tops it.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  I imagine you never used VC++ debugger...
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    I have quite regularly, but I'm just as comfortable in that of Eclipse, Qt Creator, gdb, or even binary debuggers like IDA's or OllyDbg for reverse engineering. I don't see it as a major advantage over any other platform. It's a simple GUI debugger, nothing fancy. Am I missing something?
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      - Parallel watches of multiple threads variables - Visualization of threads and their stacks contents - Customizable breakpoints in many different ways (conditions, hit count, only on special thread) - Visualization of tasks (PPL) - Its STL visualizers are much nicer to use and customize than any of the alternatives - Selective control of threads execution behavior - Re-execution of code blocks - Ability to perform code navigation across .obj and .dll files without access to source code (only on Architect version) Yeah sure, gdb can have some of this stuff, it even allows for some kind of C/C++ REPL, but I won't be debugging parallel code with it.
      - ultramancool 11y ago
        I suppose it depends on what you're used to and what features you actually need. When debugging I'm most often able to solve things with a few breakpoints, a stack dump and little else. The situations where that's insufficient for me are few and far between. When I'm debugging some code using old threading paradigms I more often than not just break out helgrind on it, which often reveals threading problems instantly. It's unavailable on Windows though.
    - vvanders 11y ago
      You lost me at Eclipse being decent...
      - ske4286 11y ago
        You got that right! The Eclipse comment got me to stop here…signup, and write. I have been a Wintel developer for 25 years. I make a modest 6-figure income writing C#/MSSQL apps (after years of (Clipper, C, C++ and Delphi) that run large businesses. I mainly write multi-threaded server apps (most from the ground up, not WCF/SOAP) but I do still venture into the GUI work and even WPF/MVVM these days. I prefer MSSQL over Oracle any day, no comparison for 99% of what is needed out there. I love Hyper-V and VMWare (even when the Linux-lineage rears its head). My server in the basement is loaded with 140TB of very redundant storage. So, not the overage scrip kiddie who picked up this computer stuff last year. I completely gave up on Linux and any OpenSource development tools a few years ago, my personality and mind (of lack of) just couldn’t deal with it. It is completely frustrating to deal with almost-no-docs, partial thoughts of most users, buzzwords, short-hand, almost no attention to detail, and often from guys living in mom's basement, that have no need to generate output and earn a paycheck. I know that sounds harsh, but it is based on my experience with software development. I tried to cope with the Linux ecosystem for 10 years, it had to stop. It does, (or did) take days to install the completely unfocused IDE Eclipse and the Android SDK (Java itself to a lesser degree). People (I will call them “enthusiasts”) with lots of time, and little experience writing maintainable software, might enjoy the challenge - but I called it hell – I could give endless examples of zero-docs or absolutely wrong examples, docs and walk-throughs. Almost every doc I ever found on setting up Linux-ish (servers) or Android dev environments, etc. was completely full of errors, and the user community seemed to love their walk through their fields of mines. And I believe that is because the authors/users can get away it - production and earning is not key, playing and killing time seems to be the focus. This is fine I guess, but not for me. I must provide value to my customers/employers and write software that is maintainable. MS and VS allow me to do this with relative ease. MS has its faults, and I can list bugs in Windows that may never be fixed. Look at the Storage Spaces mess. Look at awesome ZFS (I mean that) – and only 1 PhD required to implement and properly maintain it under Linux, with storage beyond a minimal size. Look at the nightmare of Linux, storage controllers, trying to figure out what drive has what serial #, and is attached to what port, CLI and Gerp Hell. I bet FreeNAS still forces someone into spending a day to get all the apps required to pipe and redirect and Grep 20 apps, just right (oops the doc was wrong again) to find the one bad drive and drive serial#. MS with all its faults, smiles at this kind of mess. They usually improve on this, although I can’t say Storage Spaces is an example of this. It is my strong opinion (but I haven’t had the pleasure in doing) that all one needs to do to support my point, is take a group of average to above-average users/people and give them the mission of getting a dev environment setup to take some input from a user, open a socket and send that data somewhere. All Linux attempts will fail (with hostile screaming involved), most MS VS C# attempts will succeed (with minimal cursing). It really is that simple to demonstrate. One can play around with horrible docs and horrible tools or one can express their thoughts and solutions and earn a paycheck (if you're into that kind of thing). And for real comedy, ask those same test subject to setup an SMB server, in Linux and in Windows. I think you get my point, if you are not the 1 in 1000 Linux users that knows how to do that. Nothing makes me happier than Win10 IoT Core on Raspberry. I like Arduino, I use it when I have/need to, Netduino was OK but hit its limits, but I now, in 2015, I have a rock-solid IDE and C# at my fingertips, and Raspberry and Minnowboard, my higher-level projects will now be a breeze to implement. I am sure I will experience some pain but MS always gets it together for the developers. We are all of course doing different things for different reasons. I like to build home automation solutions for myself and friends (not commercially). So my Win10 IoT Core vs. Linux views come from that limited slant. I am not wanting to argue, that happens everywhere, I simply wanted to share my point of view as I remember my Eclipse Android SDK nightmares of a few years ago. We can completely disagree on some or all of this and still enjoy the comments on this thread. I smile and laughed at some of the comments here. Fun stuff. Good luck.
- thenewwazoo 11y ago
  I used VS for C++ development professionally, and thought it was really great. Still do, in fact. I still haven't ever used anything that has a smooth and tightly-integrated edit-build-run-debug cycle. MS' documentation is (and always has been) top-notch, and hopping from code to doc and back again is easy enough to be fun. The platform sucks, of course, but if I could run MSVC++ on Linux, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    I do too, but I also use Qt Creator and Eclipse for writing C++ on RTOSes and I really don't think VS is anything special. I will agree with you about the documentation, with few exceptions MS documentation is some of the best written. But this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap. The piss poor code editing tools in VC++ irk me more than anything, I have to say that I feel like it's the worst of these platforms. Resharper for C++ is coming though, so maybe that'll change my mind.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
      * this is far from something that should prevent a platform swap* When I started Android development, the quality of documentation was so far below what I was used to from Microsoft that it hurt. If not for StackOverflow I would probably have given up and switched to Microsoft's mobile platform. Besides that, I'm not impressed by IntelliJ. Not even a little bit. I am however, vastly impressed by Visual Studio and all the IDE's that are based on it.
      - ultramancool 11y ago
        The Android docs and Java docs are actually quite good though IMO. Is there somewhere in particular you felt they were lacking? You want to see some poorly documented stuff, check out BouncyCastle's "lightweight API" or OpenSceneGraph. Great libraries, but figuring them out is a serious investment.
        11y ago
- fsloth 11y ago
  I'm left wondering what's the latest Visual Studio version you are familiar with. 2013 and 2015 are becoming pretty good - out of the box. I'm using visual studio nearly daily for C++, nothing wrong with it (except it lacked vim binding for which - there is an extension.)
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    The lack of basic C++ development features like "go to implementation", "add to header", automatic updating of prototypes or even the most basic refactoring tools like moving definitions, extracting functions, if I'm remembering correctly it didn't even have rename... yeah it drove me away pretty easily.
    - cobalt 11y ago
      VS 2013 and 2015 have added at least most of these features and if you really want some of that more fancy stuff, as said above, there is Resharper
tpio 11y ago
On a really, really shitty platform without a package manager and a decent CLI.
- cobalt 11y ago
  um, really shitty platform i nwhat regard? Also, VS has had a package manager for a while and Powershell is more than capable
  - socceroos 11y ago
    I don't understand the people who compare PowerShell to a CLI on Unix/Linux. They're worlds apart and not even comparable. PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules - but those APIs are pretty good when they do exist. Unix/Linux CLI is a core set of tools that get you at literally everything you could want and give you unbounded power and flexibility. Worlds apart.
    - UK-AL 11y ago
      "PowerShell is like a little set of APIs you can use to get at data - nothing outside of that, play within the rules " Bullshit. It's engineering rule that all Microsoft products have all the admin capabilities exposed via powershell. Most admin gui's are now simply a call to a powershell command. You can pipe, and redirect input/output just like unix shells.
      - tacos 11y ago
        Microsoft fanboy here (and OP of this sub-thread). PowerShell is a great example of how the two camps never meet in the middle. The syntax is mind-numbingly stupid. Also it's a scripting language not a shell -- but if they called it PowerScript people would just make fun of it for being bad Python. The syntax is hideous. And let's not talk about the shell itself which -- dear lord. Meanwhile Unix folk will never realize how much time they waste with broken scripts that have three sets of nested escaped quotes just so they can get text from one place to another -- even though "plain text is everything" hasn't really solved problems in a robust fashion since the 80s. Add in six different variations on regular expressions, a couple Python 2 vs 3 wars, endless battles of how to handle service startup, and the the fact that basic tools like sed and grep are stuck in some BSD never-never land on the Mac and you've got yourself a real mess. So when you're writing a script to move users, mailboxes and databases around? Maybe that PowerShell ain't so verbose after all. Better to type a little more now than deal with the pissed-off VP with an umlaut in his name later.

tacos 11y ago

I really wish I could show about 70% of the Windows knuckleheads a few Linux tools. And I really wish about half of Hacker News would spend twenty minutes with Visual Studio and Azure. Both sides have no idea what is possible. And, no. No joke.

edgyswingset 11y ago
I see it as a problem with people not being open to a shift in how to get things done. You even see it within Windows development, like the crowd who argue you can't get anything done without ReSharper. People get used to doing something one way, and any other way is seen as inferior.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Show me the Linux tools.
- tacos 11y ago
  This will get buried here and is worthy of a separate thread. But... what are the "gateway drugs" for a Windows-centric dev? A Linux-centrix dev? For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit. On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.