Microsoft’s top coders prefer Old Skool

Max - The IT Pro — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:15:21 +0000

[Gachie, Kenya]
SOMETIMES WHEN YOU make things too difficult, and try to “advance” certain tried and true practices for the sake of “progress”, sh!t happens. I kind of feel that things have gotten so advanced when it comes to developing software that we’ve forgotten the old ways of doing things. In this case, some of Microsoft’s elite programmers have stated that they don’t fancy all the “UML-GUI-easy-as-pie” coding mantra that has come to dominate the computer industry. In other words, it holds them back. Check this out:

But during a revealing and often humorous panel discussion on the future of programming at last week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s own superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software.
“I will fight you if you try to take away my text editor,” said Don Box, a Microsoft distinguished engineer.
“Do people want to draw pictures [to program]? Sure, I guess,” continued Box, who works on creating declarative languages and tools for Microsoft. “But if you grew up programming when I did, you did it in text. And I think we lose that at our peril.”
“Graphical programming environments are usable when they are useless, but unusable when they would be useful,” said Jeffrey Snover, another Microsoft distinguished engineer and creator of Microsoft’s PowerShell scripting tool for Windows. “When there are five things on the screen, you can burp that out [in text]. But when there are 500 things, [graphical programming] is completely unusable. You zoom in and zoom out and you lose all context. I think it’s just smokin’ dope.” {source}

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Microsoft’s top coders prefer Old Skool