[Technical] Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?

[Jim Maunder]

At 01:37 PM 27/10/2005, you wrote:
>In case you haven't seen this:
>
>  (FYI, Chuck Petzold is who we all learnt Windows Programming 101 off, in
>  the 1980s.)
>
>  http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
>
>... becoming nervous about where Windows programming was
>headed. Not only could you move a button onto your form
>...
>This bothered me because Visual Basic was treating a program not as a
>complete coherent document, but as little snippets of code attached to
>visual objects. That’s not what a program is. That’s not what the
>compiler sees. How did one then get a sense of the complete program? It
>baffled me.
>...
>For an author who writes programming books, all this stuff presents a
>quandary. How do you write a programming tutorial? Do you focus on using
>Visual Studio to develop applications?

I write as a person who taught himself 
programming on a HP programmable calculator, and 
later BASIC on another handheld device. I taught 
myself a bit of xBASE (dBASE11), then had lessons 
in Pascal, COBOL and C (at Deakin Uni and a short 
course at Bock Sill TAFE). Later I had the chance 
to earn a wage from programming Windows apps in 
Clipper (an xBASE compiler) with Windows 
libraries (FiveWIN, Clip4Win, and a bit of VO). 
So while I have a background in procedural, hand 
cut programming, I have also done a bit of object 
oriented, mostly hand cut code. The Windows/xBASE 
stuff was in fact snippets of code (the main 
code, the .rc file, the libraries etc were 
separate files), and the compiler just sucked 
them in and made an exe file, that hopefully worked.

While it is understandable that people might 
lament the passing of procedural, hand cut 
coding, similarly some people lament the passing 
of steam locomotives. Apparently the drivers and 
firemen loved their new, clean, quiet diesel 
locos. Like Chuck's article impiles, it is quite 
difficult and time consuming to hand write code 
for dialog boxes, forms, printing etc - you have 
to know the measurements, resolution of your 
'canvas' etc or include code to measure the 
canvas, scale the fonts, boxes etc. A proper PITA 
imho. When I first got hold of a visual form 
editor I was wrapt - it generated 100s of lines 
of good code effortlessly, and made nice looking forms.

So your problem as chalkies is how to teach 
programming as a field of study when the 
discipline of code cutting is no longer required 
in the real world. My thoughts on this is that 
for a serious student of computing it is 
important to know about such things as global and 
local variables, variable classes (is it numeric, 
alpha, integer etc?), subroutines and passing 
parameters, logic loops (do while, case of, if 
endif), arrays, stacks, queues, sorting 
algorithms etc, and so a student should start 
with a nice DOS (or other command line, non GUI) 
programming language such as Pascal (my favourite 
still) to learn the basics upon which the newer, 
visual apps develoment packages are built. A next 
step might be VBA in Excel, which uses a mixture 
of hand cut code and visual form builders, and 
you can use the 'macro' thingy to give you some code to start from.

Early versions of Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo 
C are available free on the Borland web site - 
look for something like 'heritage apps' or 'archive'.



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Ruyton Girls' School
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Jim Maunder
Ruyton Girls School
Melbourne, Australia