MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Wed, 26 Oct 2005

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]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 10/29/2005 06:02:16
MJ wrote

"Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality." It trickles down to those of us doing nothing but web programming, too; I work in higher ed, and have to hire students from time to time to work on projects. Most of them have been trained (note that I don't say "taught") on the MS tools, and they have no real understanding of developing for longevity and practicality. They want to get it done RIGHT NOW, and trying to convince them that the students I hire after they graduate will have to maintain and update their work is next to impossible. They just don't get it: why would I want them to work at what they consider a lowest-common-denominator level and learn XHTML and CSS, when they could just do it in FrontPage and have it done in an hour? It's not their ability that I question; I'm not a programmer, and I'm sure these CS majors could program circles around me in any real programming language. It's the attitude that bothers me. I'm quite worried about the software they're going to be designing when they get out into the real world.

On 10/29/2005 09:57:47
Dave H wrote

That's interesting ...

I never really thought about the tools commonly used to gen up web pages, but you're right! I still prefer BBEdit (or Notepad), but for some of the sites I maintain my wife uses Dreamweaver. It has some of the 'bad' traits of the M$ tools, but generates positively clean (human readable) code compared to them. And the Adobe tools (GoLive and Pagemaker) are worse than M$ could ever hope to be: they went so far as to add an unsupported HTML tag 'NATURALSIZEFLAG', that was only used by the tool, but which cluttered up ever image reference in a page. Thanks for the comment, and Be well, Dave H.

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