sigstop

You seem to be consistently confusing Goldman Sachs and Salomon Brothers.

What I find more disturbing is the influx of Microsoft friendly commenters. Articles on various MS products are frequent and receive a lot of praise.

Articles that point out how MS is crippling innovation through extortion of Linux users receive relatively little attention.

Google is an extremely open company (with respect to user data and user rights as well as contributions to open source software). However, most comments about Google products and contributions seem to take the most negative view possible. Case in point, today's article on Richard Stallman's comments on Android focused on how he was critical of Android, mostly ignoring that he said "Android is a major step towards an ethical, user-controlled, free-software portable phone..." Android is still the most open major platform out there. It's put Linux on millions of devices.

Why desperate? This is a valid way of advertising a product.

Didn't work for me (Ubuntu).

In fact it seems that it's impossible to install by clicking on the link

"One moment, please, while the current Silverlight installation status is determined... Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system."

Most of my peers in school used the same "compile, debug" approach as well. Most of them are still doing it and I can't see any serious software company ever hiring them (there is no shortage of positions for mediocre programmers though, so, they're doing just fine). I don't think this symptom is unique to me and my lack of discipline. As to why I didn't just "learn" to use VS or "learn" to program better? It wasn't for the lack of trying. MSDN was worthless, written documentation (yeah, it was that far back) was worthless and all of the code that other people wrote in VS that I had to interact with was absolutely terrible. It wasn't until I switched my environment until that I got any better. I got more from a man page in an hour than I did from a week of reading MSDN.

As far as Eclipse; I've worked with large codebases and I was faster with vim and knew my APIs better than any of my colleagues who used Eclipse. I heard them complain about Eclipse freezing pretty much daily (as well as doing something wrong when it came to interacting with perforce, often in a devastating way). I know that I Got more things Done than any of them.

Heh, yeah, that approach sounds pretty terrible to deal with. What I do is extensive unit tests and useful logging. Unit tests catch most of the stupid stuff and plenty of the sophisticated stuff (and are a useful thing to have for a lot of other reasons anyway). Logging lets me track down what slips through the cracks. Most of the bugs that resulted in serous production issues for me were a result of rather complex interactions between complex components, not something a debugger would have helped anyone with.

That said, I have no doubt that there are a plenty of people who are amazing at writing code in VS and are much better developers than I am.

I'm glad the tools you use work well for you.

I have coworkers who use Eclipse (for Java). It's a CPU hog; often it locks up entirely, crashes are infrequent but, happen. I've tried it; I know I'm much faster with vim. For me, my time is worth more than putting up with Eclipse.

I use 80 characters per line because if I am at a larger monitor, I can have 2 or 3 split windows side by side. If I'm at a smaller terminal, everything's still readable. I find narrower code is more readable anyway. Most developers I admire write like that. In any case, this is a major flame war topic; if you don't like it, I'm glad that your system works for you.

As far as build systems, I'll take autotools and its learning curve and pain over VS any day. I can fix it when it breaks.

What are you trying to accomplish by saying that my problem is not the tools but that I'm bad at programming? Why is it that because you think you can write decent code in VS, that means that I didn't learn anything new when I switched from it? I know I certainly did; in fact, if I could give myself any advice back when I started any sort of formal programming, it would be: get off VS and Windows immediately! I would be three years ahead of where I am now.

The debugger is a big one. I had a terrible habit of not thinking through the code but just running through the debugger until I got it working.

Not thinking about how code looks (especially to other people) since I could just resize the window to whatever.

A lot of the build complexities were hidden, which was fine as long as everything worked, but, as soon as something small broke, I spent days reading documentation and uselessly searching MSDN and the web trying to get the project to build (so, not understanding my build environment is something else I had to fix).

There are lots more (source control, collaboration, etc). I know that switching my tools and my development environment made me a better programmer.

I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but, the downmods still make me sad. I used VS for some classes in school and at my first job and it made me a worse programmer. It took years to undo the damage. In my opinion, as a developer, and in my experience in working with a lot of other developers, terminal + vim + build tools (gcc/javac/python, etc) is far superior compared to VS.

I remember attending a presentation by Elon Musk on SpaceX a few years back (late 2007, I believe). At that point, SpaceX's future was very uncertain with their two launches failing.

I recall him describing the Proton as the most reliable vehicle ever engineered by humans.

I think that SpaceX is great, but, is there really a gap to fill, in this case? Where does this gap begin?