Try programming for a day without syntax highlighting or auto-completion, and experience how pathetic you feel without them. If you’re like me, you’ll discover that those “assistants” have sapped much of your knowledge by eliminating the need to memorize even embarrassingly simple tasks.
That’s…how the world works. We move on. We aren’t programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.
‘Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.’
What a dumb take (in your quote). Autocompletion showing me all the members of an object is nothing like ChatGPT hallucinating members that don’t exist. Autocomplete will show you members you haven’t seen, or aren’t even documented.
Not to mention they said syntax highlighting is a bad thing… Why use computers at all? Go back to the golden days of punchcards
Earlier in this article I intimated that many of us are already dependent on our fancy development environments—syntax highlighting, auto-completion, code analysis, automatic refactoring. You might be wondering how AI differs from those. The answer is pretty easy: The former are tools with the ultimate goal of helping you to be more efficient and write better code; the latter is a tool with the ultimate goal of completely replacing you.
I’ve been coding in Vim for decades. Depending on my terminal emulator, I don’t always get console colors (and so, no syntax highlighting). Never bothered me.
People keep trying to tell me to use an IDE “to keep track of everything”, that they couldn’t keep it all in their heads.
I keep telling them that their code is too [complicated|bloated], or they need to [study|document] it [more|better].
Different strokes for different folks. The colors help my ADHD brain. I only have to quickly glance at it to know what it is without even reading it as I’m juggling seven different things at once in my head. It does the job of grouping things together, like “these are variables, this is a class, this is a member of an enumerated list, this is a macro” and so on and so forth. And I can quickly get that info from the color alone faster than I can from reading it and trying to remember what is was or trying to drill down where it came from.
I also have ADHD, but I hold the shape of the code in my head as I code it. I have to actually read things to remember what they are. Colors wouldn’t help me much (other than finding missing parentheses, etc).
That’s…how the world works. We move on. We aren’t programming computers by flipping toggle switches or moving patch cables around anymore either.
‘Try directly hand-coding bits into regions of memory without a compiler/linker and experience how pathetic you feel without it.’
As always
There was article about programming atmega with pulling electrodes in and out of salty water.
What a dumb take (in your quote). Autocompletion showing me all the members of an object is nothing like ChatGPT hallucinating members that don’t exist. Autocomplete will show you members you haven’t seen, or aren’t even documented.
Not to mention they said syntax highlighting is a bad thing… Why use computers at all? Go back to the golden days of punchcards
From later in the article (emphasis author’s)
Naw man, the other day I pulled a moth out of my code.
Without syntax highlighting?? Sorry I guess my pretty colors are a weakness. Some people just want to be curmudgeons
I’ve been coding in Vim for decades. Depending on my terminal emulator, I don’t always get console colors (and so, no syntax highlighting). Never bothered me.
People keep trying to tell me to use an IDE “to keep track of everything”, that they couldn’t keep it all in their heads.
I keep telling them that their code is too [complicated|bloated], or they need to [study|document] it [more|better].
Different strokes for different folks. The colors help my ADHD brain. I only have to quickly glance at it to know what it is without even reading it as I’m juggling seven different things at once in my head. It does the job of grouping things together, like “these are variables, this is a class, this is a member of an enumerated list, this is a macro” and so on and so forth. And I can quickly get that info from the color alone faster than I can from reading it and trying to remember what is was or trying to drill down where it came from.
I also have ADHD, but I hold the shape of the code in my head as I code it. I have to actually read things to remember what they are. Colors wouldn’t help me much (other than finding missing parentheses, etc).