jobs & salaries

[Kurt Granroth]

On Sep 15, 2005, at 1:57 PM, Derek Neighbors wrote:
>>  One area I've still see MS more favorably is in
>> development. Part of that is because I've been doing
>> it for a little while. (Ok, maybe more than a little.)
>> While I like Eclipse, I haven't seen dev tools that
>> come close to Visual Studio even with it's stupid
>> annoyances. Although, CVS has got to be better than
>> SourceSafe; that's what I call crap.
>>
>>
> Visual Studio is nice for point and click type of development, but  
> for more hard core development you can't beat a raw editor like vi  
> or emacs.  Currently emacs, python, postgres work fairly well for  
> me.  Add php, ruby on rails and other tools there is plenty of choice.

I am happy as a pig in mud with a bunch of open vim sessions and find  
my productivity plummeting when I have to use something else.  I even  
use vim on Windows to edit the files even if I use VS to do the  
actual compilation.

HOWEVER, I won't go as far as saying the Visual Studio is a bad  
development environment.  It's just very very different.  And there  
is nothing that approaches its power under Linux.  I tended to poo- 
poo IDEs in general and VS in particular until I started working with  
some developers that use VS every day.  A good VS developer can fly  
through development easily at the same speed as I do in vi and likely  
with a far lower learning curve.  And don't even TRY to compare the  
VS debugger with gdb.  gdb may be the most powerful debugger under  
Unix, but it comes across as a "hobby" debugger compared to the VS  
debugger.  gdb is so unreliable and unintuitive to use that I will  
nearly always prefer 'printf' style debugging under Linux rather than  
fighting with gdb.  The VS debugger is rock-solid reliable and  
everything makes perfect sense when using it.

The thing with vim/emacs vs IDE is that they are so very different  
styles of development.  Once you get used to one way, it's very  
difficult (at least at first) to be productive doing the other.  But  
whereas editor-focused developers can quickly adapt to Windows  
programming by just using cygwin or the like, adept Visual Studio  
developers are pretty much screwed coming over to Linux.