Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

> In order to get IntelliSense to work correctly, bottom-up programming is best. IntelliSense wants every class, every method, every property, every field, every method parameter, every local variable properly defined before you refer to it. If that’s not the case, then IntelliSense will try to correct what you’re typing by using something that has been defined, and which is probably just plain wrong. Maybe I'm spoiled by Resharper and similar, but I feel like this statement is wrong now…

From Plato's dialogue Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b: Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters. Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in…

No. They (can) make us more productive. When you're working with a large number of source files, the ability to have auto-complete, parameter guessing, getter/setter creation, auto-builders, and real-time code syntax/quality/checkstyle/pmd/findbugs/etc... validation means you can write working code more quickly. The ability to refactor/rename across an entire project with a click of a mouse means I'm much more likely to refactor as the code evolves, leading to higher quality, more readable, more extendable code…

<trolling> VS is 'powerful', but Vim + BufExplorer + Project add-on + Taglist + grep steals the show. (I hate emacs). </trolling> I especially hate it when schools and universities in my country (almost all the ones I know) make students use Visual Studio in CS 101. Most of these students struggle when confronted with a UNIX system where they actually have to use the shell to do tasks. Giving beginners raw components of a system to deal with rather…