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Comment by joekinley | Hacker News Reader

Thank you, I needed that. Since I got a new job recently, and switched from PHP to C# .NET, and therefore have to use VisualStudio, I feel totally dumbed down, as I have barely any idea what is happening most of the time.

And I started to blame myself for this. So this piece really speaks to me, and confirms me that it might not be my fault here.

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It's odd that people read my comment and assume I'm binary about IDEs. I'm a pragmatist, and I say use the tool that works.

I tell people they shouldn't be dependent on IDEs to write software because that gives them choice and control over their career. That doesn't mean I'm saying people should never ever use and IDE. In your situation I would have studied everything that microsoft puts out and learn to own VisualStudio. If I have to use a tool, I learn to hack the hell out of it and own it so that I'm not screwed when I need to use it.

I suggest you bite the bullet and put in the time to get good at it. I would start here:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/product-training/visu...

I think that's a Microsoft site. There's plenty of other courses online that will teach you, and they should be a tax write-off since that's professional development.

>It's odd that people read my comment and assume I'm binary about IDEs

The title of the submission is "Do not use IDEs". Seems pretty binary to me.

There might be a small difference between "Do not use IDEs. Ever" and "Do not use IDEs. In this course."

> The title of the submission is "Do not use IDEs".

But the page title of the submission it actually links to is "Exercise 0: The Setup:"

I think whoever posted this on HN was purposely taking things out of context for controversial lulz.

There is ample evidence that the rising market for IDE's is producing cruddier software, and I think your position is a fair one for anyone with any experience in the industry to hold, given that there is ample history of the subject to support the fact that the first-line of attack for any platform vendor is in the developer tools realm. No system worth its salt ever shipped without some form of development environment - and the slicker, and easier to use, the better. Anyone can pick up Visual Studio these days and bang a few things together to make their computer operate; whats sad is that its not just a built-in feature of the OS, though, and is instead guided as a product by marketing people whose desire really is to gain impressions, capture mindsets, and lock people into their brand. Your average editor doesn't do much of that; your average IDE does a hell of a lot of it. Yours is therefore a valid argument, in my opinion ..

No, it's your fault. Saying your IDE is to blame is the equivalent of saying using C to program is making you stupid because it abstracts you too far away from the underlyung architectures. Or like using the languages implementation of quicksort is bad because you don't know how efficient it is. IDEs are great because they can provide you with useful information about your project, and they can automate tasks, like refactoring, or setting up the boilerplate code. If you feel like you don't know what's going on, then it's up to you to understand what the IDE is doing. Once you know that, you'll appreciate the value of the tool doing most of the heavy lifting for you so you can focus on the actual work that needs to get done.

In a language like C# I agree with you. You have to use an IDE to get anything useful done. Same with a lot of iOS development, and Java.

But, tools have a major impact on people's ability to work. If you aren't used to using a tool it can be incredibly difficult to get started and feel capable. Telling someone that they're at fault when they're basically forced to use a foreign tool to do their job is disingenuous.

I mean, if you went to work somewhere that used Vim only how would you feel if everyone said you sucked because you had a hard time using Vim? That's basically what you did here.

No, I think you misunderstand. I'll stick with Visual Studio here because that's used as the classic example. Visual Studio does a lot of the heavy lifting when generating boilerplate code for things like Entity projects and ASP.NET MVC projects, and it does hide a lot of those configuration files. However, there is nothing stopping you from looking at those files, and investigating what tools VS is calling under the hood to generate them. The individual is at fault because he's not taking the time to learn what Visual Studio is doing and how C#/ASP.NET projects are organized. That exercise can be done independently of an IDE. Don't blame the IDE, it's like blaming the bread machine for not teaching you how to make bread.

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