Okay, I’m not _that_ 1337…
A few posts ago, I claimed to be kinda elite. It’s not all true, though. As with everything there are shades of gray - so, I guess that makes me grey-hat 1337 (haha, nerdy humour is better than… well, no humour… most of the time). I read a few news-sites related to IT in general (Computerworld and ComOn, mainly) - and they both have discussion foras that I have given up on.
It’s funny how people get annoying when their areas of expertice are limited in scope and very deep. I like to discuss general ideas and views about how to go about stuff. But when people start discussing the pros and cons of open-source vs. closed-source or whether Ubuntu is better than Suse Linux… well, I left that debate eons ago. It’s not that it isn’t interesting topics - the comments are just getting old. I can see their lips moving, but all I hear is blah-blah-blah. I’ll give you a brilliant example. The debate started about companies having trouble getting the employees they needed. One debater (who finished one of the shorter IT-educatons) claims that companies are at fault for not wanting to spend the time and money needed to enhance existing employees’ skills to a sufficient level. It’s a pretty good point, but the debate spiraled into pointlessness. In the end they were discussing whether a C/C++ coder is better than a C# coder…
It’s a moot point for one thing. Coding languages is like religion - if you know how to program in one language, you will automatically be biased against any other coding language since your coding speed will be a lot slower, your code will be error-prone and a million other draw-backs if you use your non-favorite languages. Every programmer knows that there is a myriad of solutions to a given programming problem. Most can even agree on some being a poor choice, but when it comes to finding the best one - the C-coder will want to build it in C, the VB-coder will want to use VB and the Pascal coder will refuse to do it since it’s a silly problem (this problem required something beyond his skill in Pascal - yes, it happens).
One of the debaters claimed that programmers using a language where you have to code most by hand - is better than one using a visual designer with auto-generated code since he needs to have a broader understanding of low-level code. It’s an attractive thought and might make sense under enourmous consumption of alcohol. First off, even if you auto-generate code - you will still have to understand how it works to go beyond the most basic skills. And you will still have to error-check and stream-line your auto-generated code. Auto-generated code is like always choosing default every time it is possible in an installation wizard for MS Office. Yes, 9 times out of 10 - your installation will work and everything you want is there. But you can be sure that 10 times out of 10, you will have installed something you will not need or never use. People (like me) that use auto-generators as much as they can will use less time designing and longer time cleaning up (at least they should!).
I like to use Visual Studio for coding because as I claimed in the other post, it is well-suited for extreme programming. In a very short time-span I can have something that can show basic functionality and I can start testing if my design is stable pretty quickly. Afterwards I spend a lot of time cleaning, stream-lining and polishing my code. I use MS-SQL over MySQL and Oracle - not because it is better, but because I understand MS-SQL better. I use MS Word because after disabling about 90% of it’s auto-functionality it’s close to working as stable as Open Office. I have no good reasons why we use MS Exchange at work… other than… well, we’re Gold Certified, so it’s expected of us…
So, I’m 1337 enough to tear you apart for using integers when booleans were enough, but not 1337 enough to disqualify you for using asp when I like php better. That said, I will still bash you for using Internet Explorer for anything but experiments.