Blogging Ottinger (tim)IDEs Disable Programers?
it really bothers me that programmers may be looking at the code generated by Visual Studio to learn proper programming technique
This is from Petzold’s Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind, brought to my attention by the Object Mentor blog. Really a wonderful article, which struck a number of notes with a non-windows programmer like me.
It’s long been my assertion that a decent programming languague + a decent library doesn’t need tools that patch around its insufficiencies and overcomplexities. I offer Python as one example, though I know that I just bragged on an editor (spe) that has completion. I think that Java and C++ are examples of programming languages which need a lot of automated support, being beyond human ability to keep juggle niggling details and fat api sets.
But maybe that’s just me.
Re “dynamic layout“:
I don’t know anything about Avalon. I was surprised and pleased to hear that MS is using layouts now. I did some window programming a long time ago and hated pixel- or dialog-unit- relative positioning and spacing. The next time I started playing with GUIs for fun it was in WxWindows, and I immediately saw that row sizers, column sizers, gridsizers, etc. were the way to go. I remember how we were scratching our heads at Micropoise about how much space to leave for internationalization, knowing that in WxPython it wouldn’t an issue since I used sizers. Nice to see that MS is finally getting the message. Now if they can just teach front page to stop doing it and let the browser determine the page width. I hate seeing skinny columns in the middle of a big page.
