doomkeeper

Nothing earns you geek points more than using an editor like Vim or Emacs.  Frankly the contrary is also true if you stoop as low as using Visual Studio. I work with a number of people who look down their nose when they see me using VS.  With green text on black trying to look all retro, smug in the knowledge they are so much cooler than me.

Ok I know, I’m probably fighting a losing battle here. As the likes of Vim and Emacs run on every platform known to man and they are very extenible. Everyone loves to hate M$ etc.

To give you a  bit of background; I used emacs for 14 months while working exclusively on HP Spark / Dec alpha machines in good old fashion UNIX. I wrote a few Lisp scripts for emacs, but nothing special. I did learn to love it and I found using VS afterwards almost like playing with a toy. No developer worth anything would ever consider using VS. You’d be laughed at by any level of unix / level programmer and quite rightly so.

Anyway, that was 8 years ago and things have changed. I still do a lot of C++ development, but I also do .NET languages such as C#.

Now the reason I can’t leave VS is ultimately Visual-Assist. I love it! To be without it I now feel disabled as a programmer.

Visual-Assist for all that don’t know is essentially ‘intelisense’ on steroids. It’s made by WholeTomatoe software and it’s fantastic.

I often sit there being asked by my trendy friends where various code lives. They’ll have a class name, and simply want to look up the definition. I’d forgotten how brilliant Visual assist is with symbols. ALT+G on a symbol and it jumps straight to the code definition. Watching my Vim buddies work… well it’s regular expression followed by, calling grep or something like that. Vim doesn’t do any symbol parsing or anything, so if you’re looking for horribly generic fuction like Update(), you’d have a hell of a time finding it.

This having the symbols correctly parsed is so handy for refactoring too. Want to rename a class, no problem. It correctly scopes all changes so it’s infinitely better than a blind and brutal a reg-exp. Change a functions params? Visual Assist will change all calls to this and replace them correctly.

I have become so reliant on it, it shapes my want to learn other languages. Looking up APIs is a waste of time and is frankly tedious.

So is this a bad thing? Have I become simply lazy in my reliance on this tool? Or has my productivity increased so much that anything else seems like a waste? Maybe so.

Now I know I’ll be told that there exists a VIM plugin for visual studio, so I can have the best of both worlds. Well perhaps… But I guess that’s not my point. My point is without realising it, I’ve become so reliant on a tool that I can’t contunue without it. I draw a parrallel with mobile phones here as I belive it’s a good analogy.

Do you remember all your phone numbers now? No? Well of course mobiles phones remember them all for you. Has that made you worse as a telphonist? Perhaps? Would you feel crippled if you were faced with a phone with no numbers? Or have you accepted that it’s a the future and embrace being lazy and use the phones memory. Well I believe this is exactly the same as learning an API back to front. Relying on the compiler to find your syntax errors is simply way too old school now.

Anyway, I hope this generates some discussion. Please let me know your feelings on the matter I will be quite interested to hear peoples oppinions.

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