26 Oct 2005
Does Visual Studio Rot the Brain?

In a word: yes. Which is why I prefer Borland tools. C++ Builder and Delphi give you the option of going for true RAD, but both have facilities that make it easy to get down and dirty with the code, including inlining assembly.

The last decent UI for dev tools that M$ released was the [in]famous "Quick" series: QuickBASIC, QuickC and QuickPascal. The compilers in that series weren't bad, either, although Borland's tools of the time (Turbo C and Turbo Pascal) still managed to build tighter executables. I truly despised the Borland editing environment with those compilers, though, and would often code and test using the M$ tools, and then manually make the production version with the Borland compilers.

As a UNIX guy dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows world, I've never really been able to enjoy Windows programming. Charles Petzold, who is a long-time developer for DOS & Windows really laid out the reasons for me at the NYC .NET Dev group. Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality.

(link) [Slashdot]

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