Good tools are about productivity not quality

Published 25 October 5 10:35 PM | Ramon Smits

Jeff Atwood writes in his post The Cognitive Style of Visual Studio about bad programmers in combination with RAD and tools like Visual Studio that brings too much people in our business that don't know shit about programming. Very nice article to read and the bottom line as I read it is good tools are all about productivity but not about quality.

Comments

# Dennis van der Stelt said on October 26, 2005 12:04 AM:

I don't completely degree with him. He's right when he says VB6 was so easy, laywers, teachers, doctors, everyone was doing VB6.

But when he says Visual Studio does too much, I don't think he's right. It seems he's ill from the NIH syndrome.

I know you can just go to your Access database, throw a table into your project, bind it to a grid and you have an application. Now that _is_ easy, and I don't do that myself. I also don't think our clients will like it when we do that.

But there are other things that do come in handy. I don't like DataBinding, because in .NET 1.1 it really sucked, doing well. I've heard a lot of stories, and practiced with it myself a bit. But in .NET 2.0, this seems much more practicle. You're able to do much more, much easier. I can see the benefit for clients if they want to use that. Why throw it away? Because it's NIH?

When he says that it degrades the programming experience, I can see a point though. I still don't like databinding. I'm not really sure why. It's just some gut feeling that I don't have full control over what's happening. But that shouldn't hold me back to invest time in it, to support it.

In fact, I'm going to do some coding with databinding to my Windows UI objects today. :)

Thanks Ramon! :)