Random Perl ... rant

[Jonathan Rockway]

* On Thu, Apr 03 2008, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 12:34:56PM +0100, Dean Wilson wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 12:13:39PM +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
>> > (actually there are two things that I don't see changing anytime soon
>> > - Windows becoming an operating system I'm happy to develop on or
>> > Visual Studio becoming available on one of the the OSes I like).
>> How much of your view of not liking Windows to develop on is because of
>> a toolchain ...
>
> I don't like Windows to develop on because I have no other reason to use
> Windows, and so it seems like a waste of effort to learn enough to use
> Windows effectively just so that I can develop code on it effectively.
> Visual Studio would need to be pretty fucking spectacular to get over
> that hump.  It would no doubt not need to be so spectacular for you, as
> you're more used to Windows than I am.

I'll add to this that I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the
best programmers choose tools other than Windows and Visual Studio.

>> Although saying that the ability to single step debug from windows
>> forms, to an ASP.NET app in IIS down to the SQL Server stored procedure
>> in a single integrated window does rock.
>
> Yes, it would.  It's vanishingly rare that I would find that useful,
> though.  Almost all bugs I write are typos that get caught by strict
> and/or warnings, or algorithm errors such as getting an if() the wrong
> way round.  And these days I try to develop in such a way that I can
> really quickly zoom in on the bug - it has to be in the last ten lines
> of code I wrote, for example.

Debuggers are too tedious to be useful.  Again, I don't think it's a
coincidence that most of the best programmers use "print" instead of
single-stepping.

Shiny tools /= sharp ones.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

-- 
print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"