Charles Petzold bared his soul last night at our NYCDOTNETDEV User Group as he talked about code without the benefit of a computer or those familiar bullet point PowerPoint slides.
We write the code that makes the world sing.
Code is power.
Charles loves code and all the things he can do with it, but lately he has been having misgivings about using the powerful IDE Visual Studio because he loves code. Charles admitted to us all that he is addicted to intellisesence and would like nothing better then to turn it off, but he can’t. It’s the proliferation of API’s, methods, functions and attributes that has us all overly dependence on intellisence and all those other wizards and templates contained in Visual Studio. Gone are the days when a programmer could be familiar with all the Windows files, that exponential curve has stretched the list beyond our comprehension.
Charles loves Visual Studio 2005, but he compulsively peeks at the code behind in an effort to understand what Visual Studio is doing to his code and most of the time he would have done it differently if only he had the time.
Over the past six months he has gone back to writing little programs in C, the first programming language he ever learned, the pure drop of distilled code.
Charles is currently writing a new book on Programming the API Formally Known as Avalon. He loves XMAL, but he didn’t trust it till he realized that he could edit the code behind XML and now it looks like he will influence the next generation of Windows presentation programmers.
It was a fabulous talk, I wish we had video taped it so Charles could get all of you to think more about our dependence on tools rather then our own wits.
Charles will next be appearing at DevConnections in Las Vegas, November 7-10; he’s giving a talk on programming for the Tablet PC, that’s something I don’t want to miss. Hopefully we will be able to persuade him to give his Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind talk one more time.