stuff is cool

I know that not a lot of the stuffiscool blog readers are as computer geeky as me, but I also know that a handful of them are and this post (and future posts to come) is for them.

So, over on the SomethingAwful forums (good for geek and non-geek alike!), in the computer hardware/software forum there was a discussion about teaching one’s self how to code. Well, of course it quickly devolved into the “pimp your favorite programming language” contest that all of those threads inevitably end up as, and of course even the incredibly crappy and stupid languages have people standing up to defend them. So of course there were the pro-Visual Studio folks and one of them made the claim that:

In my opinion the most important things for a beginner is to see results quickly and I know of no better RAD language than C#. If you know what you’re doing you can create a Notepad clone in less than 10 minutes.

I won’t dispute that last sentence. In my not-very-extensive experience with Visual Studio I can confirm that that is indeed a true statement. However, the rebuttal to that statement is perhaps my favorite indictment of the Visual * languages to date (all emphasis mine):

The problem is that you can create a Notepad clone in less than 10 minutes even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And that, in a nutshell, I think highlights one of the biggest reasons why so much software these days sucks so badly. Yes, people can “get the job done” faster with these RAD tools, but at what price? I think lowering the barrier-to-entry for programming is a bad thing if you’re going to do it in such a way that you can forsake/forego learning the underlying formalities. It’s one thing to provide something that will give a new person quick results, and it’s quite another to provide folks with a “black box” that just does a bunch of hand waving and forces you to rely on it.