Quote:Original post by Telastyn

Quote:
It's the same reason why I don't think Visual Studio is a good tool to teach programming with and why I agree with handwritten code for exams. It teaches discipline.

It teaches you to remember trivia. It promotes the use of undescriptive variable names. It hinders programmers' ability to get things done. It is a waste of time.

I disagree fully. Handwritten code for exams is pure, unadulterated write-code-for-humans-to-read evaluation, and is probably the best kind of code a student could be asked to write for their evaluation. Learning to write code for a compiler is something you can learn on your own (the compiler will disagree with you until you get it right) but learning to write code for humans is something better learned from others.

As a side note, I've developed without a sensible IDE for quite a while, and it has also taught me a great deal of things.

Absence of auto-completion features forced me, through sheer laziness, to have a consistent design and naming strategy, so that I can guess the name of a class or method without having to look it up. It also forced me to reduce dependencies so that I only seldom have to depend on code outside what I'm writing (and therefore remember the names in that code), giving me natural tools to reduce coupling and wrap external APIs in tight modules to avoid leaking external naming strategies into my own code.

Absence of a debugger forced me, through sheer laziness, to mentally evaluate my programs before executing them to determine if bugs were present, and to fully memorize the contents of modules I was creating, allowing me to determine where a given bug was just by looking at it. When developing Darklaga, which happened fully without a debugger, only two bugs required me to trace through the code with log statements, out of several hundred bugs that were solved by my looking at the game screen, going "Hmmm..." and then opening the right file and changing the right line.

Absence of template generation tools, combined with an early distaste for copy-paste programming, taught me to factor repetitive code as soon as it appeared (in fact, before it even appeared, because I was too lazy to write it if it was already written).

Of IDEs, I still tend to only use the project management features and the build features. I still only need to open a debugger perhaps once every two days, and it's generally in dynamic languages that have no compiler and thus report most syntax errors through the debugger (&#106avascript, I mean you). The only large debug-fests I perform are when I use C#, and mostly because of interacting with the .NET library (though I can only assume that my inexperience with the library combined with its lack of complete, concise and clear documentation is the root cause of this necessity). However, in all my C++, Objective Caml or PHP programming, which easily represents 90% of my coding time, I have perhaps used a debugger four times in the last six months, because I'm used to identifying the issue in my head.

So, if you program professionally, use an IDE. It does boost your immediate productivity by allowing you to solve any issues (find a method, find a class, find a bug, and so on) and also works quite well for interacting with code you didn't write (and thus couldn't have memorized). But as long as you're a learning programmer on your own, resist the temptation. Only use the debugger if you simply cannot find a bug after searching on your own—don't become so debugger-reliant that you can't spot an obvious bug by simply re-reading your code. If you can't find the name of something, then rename that thing so that it uses an easily remembered name, so that you gain a natural tendency to write names that are descriptive and unambiguous.

Quote:Original post by JimmyDeemo
How dumbed down did you get? What IDE DID you use? I think that doing the same thing as you did may improve my code a lot.

I started with an early HyperCard version. No auto-complete, no decent manual (I had to learn language commands by reading other programs), not even syntax highlighting or code formatting and certainly no serious debugger.

Then I moved on to Borland C++ Builder 4, then to Visual C++ 6, both of which were unreasonably pre-standard, although they did provide an elementary debugger that sometimes actually managed to run. Darklaga development happened in Visual C++ Embedded Edition 4, which had a lousy emulator for debugging that simply didn't match my hardware, so I had a lightweight VS6-like IDE with no debugging facilities (though my "build, upload to embedded device, run" process worked fine).

These days, I use Visual C# for .NET development, and emacs for PHP/OCaml/C++ development. I also write &#106avascript, XSLT and CSS in emacs, but use FireBug for testing and debugging.

Quote:Original post by Daerax
No longer could I in a step, use elegant theorems from Category Theory to derive algorithms and write programs to solve difficult constraint and mathematical optimization problems simply.

You could install a translation module [smile]