michael eaton

Cyrus asked Are some features more harmful than helpful?

I found this paragraph to be rather interesting (it has provoked several replies on his blog):
”Another tools feature that we worry about would be Edit & Continue.  Richard Grimes has a very interesting article on it where he argues that it actually leads to poor development and design skills.  I somewhat agree with this view.  As I posted about earlier, when I'm in Ocaml/Java/C# i never use a debugger.  Why?  Because I tend to keep follow development processes that make it unnecessary.  When things to go wrong I tend to just sit down and think about it for about 5 minutes after which I'm pretty sure I know what the issue is.  A quick test will usually confirm it.  I'll then fix up the issue and add tests to make sure that it won't happen again.  When i use the debugger I tend to find the area where the problem actually manifests itself and I'm then tempting to fix it right there.  By doing this I might be overlooking the fact that something else way before actually screwed something up and I'm fixing it in the wrong place”

I happen to agree with Cyrus on this one.  I don't miss E&C (even though I was a hardcore VB developer for years).  Like Cyrus said, I tend to think a bit more when I find an error.  In my VB days, I would hit an error, fix it and drive on.  I have to say that more times than not, my initial fix was *wrong*.  This is because I could make the fix and move on without really thinking about it.  I would end up fixing the symptom, but not the actual bug.

Many people on Cyrus' blog have said E&C is good because they can fix a but without having to spend 10 minutes in the “find the bug, stop the program, fix the bug, start the program, get back to the spot where the error occurred” mode.  While I understand what they're saying, that doesn't bother me.  I get paid to write good code.  I don't get paid to make sloppy fixes. :-)