GA'day, mate: Open the plonk, turn up a banger, Visual Studio 2019 is officially here (don't get too excited, Mac devs) It's a big day for Microsoft developers as Visual Studio 2019 for PC and Mac emerged, blinking, into the light of General Availability. The big Daddy of Microsoft's PC dev tools hits v16 Having first pitched up in preview form at the end of 2018 following MSFT's Connect(); event, Visual Studio 2019 in general availability …
Back when I was a Student Apprentice at Racal in the mid-80s (complete with indenture papers), I drew the short straw for compute resources. I got the VT220 (not even a nice Wyse) onto our file server - a 2 Mbyte Sun-2/x80 (can't remember 180 or 280 without looking) serving ten diskless 2M Sun-2/50s and /60s, each with one user on the big screen and one on a Wyse, via good old thick-as-yer-thumb Ethernet.
That server was a wee bit busy.
I had a choice of vi (128k binary) or emacs (2M binary) as my editor. On a 2M machine.
Unsurprisingly, I learned vi. Those who remember their VT codes will also be unsurprised to learn that I used hjkl to navigate rather than the cursor keys; the editor could stall for several seconds at times, sometimes midway through processing a cursor key press, leading to it believing I'd pressed ESC, paused, and then ] ... whatever. Most irritating.
I still use vim on Linux, gvim on Windows; and I've rather liked the VS2019 previews, they've run remarkably well on my rather more modern dev box that probably cost me less than the VT220 would have done in 1985!
A "steep" learning curve is one in which the user gains proficiently quickly. It's not how I would describe Venomous Studio. (I've used the damned thing for decades and I'm still finding new misfeatures and idiotic design failures.)
Of course, vi and bash have pretty shallow learning curves too. vi (well, vim) may be my editor of choice, but I don't think it's easy to learn. What makes it better than VS is far less bloat and far fewer black boxes that misbehave in incomprehensible ways when you try to do anything that Microsoft didn't anticipate and decide to cater to.
Yes, the literal interpretation of the English phrase "steep learning curve" means a quick increment of a skill. However, in the common vernacular it means quite the opposite. English is full of little quirks like that ... part of what makes it a fun language. Or a frustrating one, if your mind tends towards the negative.
Vim is about right for me. Simple, reliable, basic commands. Available everywhere. Language helpers do indent and syntax.
VS, and other IDEs, tend to be complex and have all sorts of extras I don't need. Probably useful for early coders but you quickly grow out of it.
And: "Here's something vaguely similar but inappropriate. Would you like to use it instead of figuring out what you should do?"
This is an astoundingly stupid feature. I commend the VS team for inventing such a productive mechanism for adding bugs to software.
... you know the rest.
You'd think they could have cleaned up the U.I. a little? Visual Studio has always had a bit of a reputation for wasting your screen space and, guess what: they've made it even worst: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/idea/413071/giving-us-even-more-vertical-screen-space.html
I'll stick to older versions, when I have to use Visual Studio.
Am I the only one that hates this trend of moving menus and tabs into the titlebar? The titlebar should be controlled by the OS not the application, and it should be consistent. Now I have to hunt around to find some of the titlebar I can click on to drag the window
One portrait and one landscape monitor on my main dev box, each about 24" diagonal. The combination gives some surprisingly flexible options - I have a habit of moving output / find / watch / ... windows to the secondary (portrait) monitor, which still has plenty of room at the top for a useful amount of Firefox real-estate given the modern idiocy of most sites wasting loads of horizontal space.
I have a similar setup on this Slackware box, but I add a so-called "dumb" terminal hanging off a serial port (usually a USB port these days ... ::grmbl::). Kind of handy to have a friendly login prompt when/if the GUI goes TITSUP[0]. I do most of my serious writing on it as there are fewer distractions with a CLI. It's also a handy place to send stderr when debugging. Handy. Recommended.
[0] Total Inability To Show the Usual Pr0nPictures.
"not too shabby these days"
Bloody awful overall, though.
Consider that back in the day, Mark Williams C was one of my go-to tools ... You could fit (and use!) the whole system, including compiler, assembler, linker, libraries, decent screen editor, etc. on a single, DOS-bootable 1.44 Meg floppy!
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