Visual Studio, and why it must be avoided at all costs.

Words alone cannot describe the utterly insane and retarded nature of the compiler that comes bundled with Visual Studio 2013 Express. WORDS ALONE CANNOT !!!

I was happily hacking away at this SHIT^[1] IDE^[2] when I ran into the rather odd error C1004: unexpected end-of-file found. Note that this is inside of a header file and I'm using sepples. So I did what any competent programmer would do and checked my brackets, which yielded no results. Of course, Microsoft Intellishite wasn't saying anything about any brackets, it was only spouting errors about and not being defined^[3].

I then checked every .cpp file of my goddamn project to unravel this shit mystery, which caused me to destroy half of my code and made me further realize what a depressing existence I have by commenting out half of any file that even REMOTELY included this header, which again, yielded no results.

Obviously, I didn't make this post just to discuss an error I didn't find, because I DID.

contd.

>>17
No they aren't. If I'm working in a 1200 file, 600,000 line program I don't want to manually find all 320 calls of some function cause I found a use for part of its functionality and decided to split it into two. I shouldn't have to update my TAGS file manually (or is a TAGS file to unmacho for you in the first place and you grep your code base or do some silly UNIX trick (like this guy who I saw using sed and awk and constantly breaking his build and spending the rest of his day trying to fix it) that sees your program as text (i.e. not a representation of a computer program, which is all the text is!)). I shouldn't have to worry if I forgot to change the prototype in the header. I shouldn't have to write the same boring text over and over and over again to interface some service I can't control just because my language is braindead and doesn't allow enough expressiveness to automate that.

And if you do want to do these things, then you are not a programmer. You are some kind of typing and screen staring enthusiast.

Programs in the hands of the skilled are an aether, and the wizard moulds that aether with his hands, weaving it with agility and skill. To the unnskilled, programs are like pyramids where changing one thing makes everything fall down so they spend a year sectioning it off for repairs. You shouldn't waste your time on this. It's pointless.

Emacs, Genera, Pharo, Eclipse, Visual Studio, Mathematica's notebook interface. These are the IDEs I have used and every one of them I have loved and cherished for the menial labor they absolve me.

Once upon a time computers were moving towards your whole operating system having knowledge of what programs actually are, and being able to do operations on them as programs instead of blobs to load and execute. Since then operating systems have gone backwards, and then every now and then I'm surprised by people wanting even editors and tools to go backwards and offer no more ability to manipulate programs than you do any other series of bytes, completely ignoring what those series of bytes actually are!

(I'm surprised you mention embedded development as somehwere where IDEs are useful, because embedded development is actually somewhere where you can get away with a text editor, compiler (or assembler, disassembler etc. Micros usually have, what, 10KB of program memory? something tiny like that so your programs are hardly gonna get to the point where the services of an IDE are super useful.)