6 ms·

I have grown to hate the MS family of programs's insistence that Daddy knows best, and I must turn off the magic on a case-by-case basis. I noticed a big diffe

by msg 18y ago

I have grown to hate the MS family of programs's insistence that Daddy knows best, and I must turn off the magic on a case-by-case basis. I noticed a big difference when I transitioned from Visual Studio/Netbeans type coding to Emacs. I stopped hunting through class hierarchies and started, you know, actually learning the libraries I needed to use. Emacs lets me be the magician. I haven't programmed using XAML, but it reminds me of the .ui file produced by Qt Designer, which I've edited by hand at times.

snprbob86 18y ago
Hopefully, if the library designers are doing their jobs, you aren't hunting through class hierarchies. Instead, you should be falling into a pit of success. That is, some path to your solution should always be immediately obvious and that simplest path should always be the correct one. Clearly an unachievable goal in the general sense, but surprisingly doable overall in statically typed languages. One example: I know I have to call A.F(B), so I know that I need to construct B, which offers B.ctor(X) and B.ctor(Y), but I don't have an X, so clearly I need B.ctor(Y) ... etc. IntelliSense would have pointed you right to it! I used to have a tendency to thumb through IntelliSense (and sometimes I still do!), but have taken to reading the docs before starting because most of the libraries I interact with are just too complex! The real problem is, that the majority of code that I consume isn't documented at all anyway, so hunting through the class hierarchies (or code directly) is all I've got. For the record, my tools are: C/C++ = Visual Studio and Source Insight; C# = Visual Studio with Resharper; Java = IntelliJ IDEA; Python = Wing; Javascript = gggrrrrrrrr; XML, HTML = Notepad2; Other text files = Notepad2 or Visual Studio; whichever has the focus :-)
- ajross 18y ago
  One might submit that if you were to learn a single editor and use it for all your tasks, you might not only be more productive at each of them but your answer to an editor for Javascript might be something other than "ggrrrrr".
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    I actually use Notepad2 for Javascript. It is a great, all around, bare bones, dead simple editor. I say ggrrrrr because I want my IDE features! I'm actually quite proficient at Vim. I used it day in and day out at Google for 3 months. It just drove me nuts. Vim (and presumably Emacs) are fantastic general-purpose text editors. Too bad I only spent a tiny portion of my time editing general text. I spend the vast majority of my time editing CODE.

by msg 18y ago

snprbob86 18y ago

Hopefully, if the library designers are doing their jobs, you aren't hunting through class hierarchies. Instead, you should be falling into a pit of success. That is, some path to your solution should always be immediately obvious and that simplest path should always be the correct one. Clearly an unachievable goal in the general sense, but surprisingly doable overall in statically typed languages. One example: I know I have to call A.F(B), so I know that I need to construct B, which offers B.ctor(X) and B.ctor(Y), but I don't have an X, so clearly I need B.ctor(Y) ... etc. IntelliSense would have pointed you right to it! I used to have a tendency to thumb through IntelliSense (and sometimes I still do!), but have taken to reading the docs before starting because most of the libraries I interact with are just too complex! The real problem is, that the majority of code that I consume isn't documented at all anyway, so hunting through the class hierarchies (or code directly) is all I've got. For the record, my tools are: C/C++ = Visual Studio and Source Insight; C# = Visual Studio with Resharper; Java = IntelliJ IDEA; Python = Wing; Javascript = gggrrrrrrrr; XML, HTML = Notepad2; Other text files = Notepad2 or Visual Studio; whichever has the focus :-)

ajross 18y ago
One might submit that if you were to learn a single editor and use it for all your tasks, you might not only be more productive at each of them but your answer to an editor for Javascript might be something other than "ggrrrrr".
- snprbob86 18y ago
  I actually use Notepad2 for Javascript. It is a great, all around, bare bones, dead simple editor. I say ggrrrrr because I want my IDE features! I'm actually quite proficient at Vim. I used it day in and day out at Google for 3 months. It just drove me nuts. Vim (and presumably Emacs) are fantastic general-purpose text editors. Too bad I only spent a tiny portion of my time editing general text. I spend the vast majority of my time editing CODE.