Leading Microsoft programmers work in a text editor.

Over the past 20 years, Microsoft has done more than anyone else to promote GUIs, and Visual Basic and Visual Studio tools feed millions of programmers around the world. However, Microsoft experts themselves often prefer to encode in a regular text editor.



This was discussed at a recent PDC conference in the section on the future of programming. “Do people like to draw pictures in the program? Probably, yes, says Don Box, who at Microsoft is working on creating declarative programming languages ​​and tools. “But if you grew up programming like me, you do it in text form.” And it seems to me dangerous that we are losing it. "



"Graphical programming environments are convenient when they are useless, and inconvenient when needed," added Jeffrey Snover, another leading Microsoft developer, creator of PowerShell. “When there are five things on the screen, you can handle with text tools, but when there are 500 things there, the graphical interface might help, but it is completely unsuitable in this case.” You zoom in and out and lose the whole context. ”



Although visual programming can be easier to learn and helps to increase work efficiency, it also “easily misleads you,” said Butler Lampson, a technical consultant at Microsoft. “For example, no one will ever tell you what a UML diagram means.” Butler Lampson is the 1992 Turing Award and co-author of nine programming languages .

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Jeffrey Snover joked that programming has reached such an abstract level that it will soon be possible to write code using the Xbox game controller. A new generation of such controllers (Project Natal) recognize body movements, that is, you can simply dance in front of the screen.



Another programming guru, Herb Sutter, the leading developer of the C ++ / CLI language, predicts that in ten years, programming in a text editor will become fashionable again, because as soon as the performance limit is reached, “optimization will become very attractive again”.