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I have clarified my point in another comment already. It's not about who's better. It's about who's trying to experiment and rethink things. In developer tools

I have clarified my point in another comment already. It's not about who's better. It's about who's trying to experiment and rethink things. In developer tools team of the top-10 tech company you have a great combo: best hard-core engineers on the planet + little need to maintain cruft and worry about competition. Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Xcode 4 is this radical attempt to improve old problems (of course introducing new ones). And VS does not try to eliminate old obvious problems and almost stays where it is in terms of UI. Update: here are related thoughts on the subject: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/18156593863/why-apple-products-are-well-designed-and-buggy http://blog.oleganza.com/post/18156593863/why-apple-products...

algoshift 15y ago
> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective. Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE. I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images, audio, video). The thousands of files end-up piled-up without any semblance of organization in the project directory. I mean, who woke up one day and though "This is a good idea!" when you have a perfectly good file system to take advantage of? Updating assets is an absolute nightmare. Yes, yes, there are crafty work-arounds. Each with its own pros-and-cons. The point is that the IDE itself was designed to totally ignore the underlying file system. Let's put it this way: If I wrote code like that at the many jobs I've had over the years I would have gotten fired in a microsecond. Yet, for some reason, this is "feature" is now considered good design? Back to coding.
- oleganza 15y ago
  The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine. Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have more liberty to do so. It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users are used to certain operations and want to preserve their productivity. But it's not hard to throw away toolbar in an IDE because nobody will pay you less because of it. (Especially if you are actually trying to do your best.) Metro after Windows is that kind of experiment (but way more risky and rewarding, of course). But Visual Studio is not inspiring at all after all these years. PS. For that matter, Xcode 4 is not radical enough too. We are still typing a lot of boring cruft (even with ever-smarter autocompletion). But it's a huge difference with Xcode 3 and other IDEs out there.
  - algoshift 15y ago
    >It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff. I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes. Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking. Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.
    - MartinCron 15y ago
      I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.
      - algoshift 15y ago
        Of course. This was just one illustration of Excel as an augmentation tool. There are probably thousands of such special applications out there, some commercial, some not, that used Excel this way. The greater point, perhaps, is that making things prettier at the expense of raw functionality isn't always the best idea. For the record, on first inspection I like the outer appearance of VS 2011. I like the pictographic icons and clean uncluttered appearance. I hope that this effort did not come at the expense of function elsewhere. We'll upgrade when it comes out of beta and see.

algoshift 15y ago

> Why not experiment and try to be better at what you do? Herein lies the problem. The term "better" is most definitely subjective. Not to pic on Xcode, but this is a prime example of focusing too much on making a consumer appliance rather than a professional tool. Like I said: I don't want iTunes, I want a kick-ass IDE. I'm in the middle of a project that has, quite literally, thousands of assets to manage (images, audio, video). The thousands of files end-up piled-up without any semblance of organization in the project directory. I mean, who woke up one day and though "This is a good idea!" when you have a perfectly good file system to take advantage of? Updating assets is an absolute nightmare. Yes, yes, there are crafty work-arounds. Each with its own pros-and-cons. The point is that the IDE itself was designed to totally ignore the underlying file system. Let's put it this way: If I wrote code like that at the many jobs I've had over the years I would have gotten fired in a microsecond. Yet, for some reason, this is "feature" is now considered good design? Back to coding.

oleganza 15y ago
The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine. Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have more liberty to do so. It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users are used to certain operations and want to preserve their productivity. But it's not hard to throw away toolbar in an IDE because nobody will pay you less because of it. (Especially if you are actually trying to do your best.) Metro after Windows is that kind of experiment (but way more risky and rewarding, of course). But Visual Studio is not inspiring at all after all these years. PS. For that matter, Xcode 4 is not radical enough too. We are still typing a lot of boring cruft (even with ever-smarter autocompletion). But it's a huge difference with Xcode 3 and other IDEs out there.
- algoshift 15y ago
  >It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users Excel is another of my favorite "Why did they do that?" examples. In my opinion, MS absolutely ruined Excel somewhere in the transition from Office 2003 to 2007. If you were a power user with Excel'03 you felt like a total idiot with Excel'07. And, this wasn't a matter of a few buttons here and there. The thing was almost utterly unusable compared to what you could do with the '03 version. Furthermore, they complicated the usage of VBA modules. If you had a library of VBA work that you used regularly you, all of a sudden, found yourself scratching your head trying to figure out how to do some pretty basic stuff. I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. Simple examples are the generation of repetitive lookup table code in various languages. Or code to pre-stuff database tables. Or maintaining a complex LUT-driven state machine. I have custom Excel tools that have taken months to develop that do increase productivity in a measurable way. For example, one tool uses Excel to auto-magically write the code (LUT, callbacks, etc.) for a menu system on an embedded device with an LCD display. Before the tool it'd take hours, if not a couple of days, to maintain. After the custom VBA tool it was a matter of minutes. Anyhow, upon switching to '07 (mostly a forced switch because I needed to migrate to a 64 bit OS for Finite Element Analysis work) I went from light speed to crawling. That, to me, is not an improvement. I am OK with learning new things, you have to be open to it if you want to remain in this game, but sometimes you can't help but scratch your head and try to figure out what the hell they were thinking. Thankfully that was easily solved with a VM running XP and Excel'03.
  - MartinCron 15y ago
    I use Excel extensively for automated code generation. I'm not going to argue if this is a good thing or a bad thing to do, but even you have to agree that this is an extremely rare thing to do, and something that would be more or less impossible for Microsoft to anticipate you doing.
    - algoshift 15y ago
      Of course. This was just one illustration of Excel as an augmentation tool. There are probably thousands of such special applications out there, some commercial, some not, that used Excel this way. The greater point, perhaps, is that making things prettier at the expense of raw functionality isn't always the best idea. For the record, on first inspection I like the outer appearance of VS 2011. I like the pictographic icons and clean uncluttered appearance. I hope that this effort did not come at the expense of function elsewhere. We'll upgrade when it comes out of beta and see.