TL;DR: Intellisense works best if you write bottom-up (true) and it means you have to remember less stuff (also true), therefore it makes you write worse code (very doubtful).

So I don’t think IntelliSense is helping us become better programmers. The real objective is for us to become faster programmers, which also means that it’s cheapening our labor.

This doesn’t make any sense though.

1. People don’t have unlimited time. Writing high quality code takes time and wasting it remembering or typing stuff that Intellisense can take care of means I have less time for refactoring etc. Also one of the really useful things about Intellisense is that it enables better refactoring tools!

2. It doesn’t make you dumber to use tool assistance. It just means you get less practice in doing the thing that the tool helps you with. Does that matter? Of course not! Does it matter that I can’t remember how to do long division because I always use a calculator? Absolutely not. Similarly it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember off the top of my head which languages use starts_with, HasPrefix, startswith, etc. doesn’t matter at all if Intellisense can easily tell me.

3. You don’t have to use the Intellisense suggestions. Just press escape. It’s very easy.

4. It’s very well known that making something easier to do increases demand for it.

(Not so) Fun fact: I first learnt how to use Xamarin from a book he wrote. It wasn’t very good (not unlike Microsoft documentation). He started out just having everything in MainPage, then switched to having separate classes (like MVVM stuff), but didn’t point out he had made this switch! The code snippets didn’t reflect that this was actually now in a different class! Wait what?? Wait what?? Why is none of this working?! 😂 There was a later chapter about MVVM, but he had switched styles BEFORE that chapter. So when he talks about top-down and bottom-up, well, his book was an explode in the middle approach! 😂

Very long shitpost?

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that is an ungodly 40 minute read without much of a takeaway. Here’s the AI generated tl;dr

The author recounts a reluctant experience with public speaking, stemming from a past incident where he discussed topics beyond his audience’s expectations. Despite initially hesitating, he revives his experience to talk about “Computers in the Movies,” drawing parallels between the portrayal of computers in films and real technological advances. The author highlights the impact of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and WarGames in depicting computers as both helpers and threats, often reflecting societal fears about technology. He contrasts Hollywood’s dramatizations with today’s mundane reality of technology, pointing out how things like email and PowerPoint have subtly influenced our behaviors and thinking, suggesting that our relationship with technology is akin to addiction rather than dependency. Transitioning to modern development practices, the author critiques tools like Visual Studio and features like IntelliSense for shaping, perhaps simplifying, programming methods. Despite these tools’ capabilities, he fears they undermine coding skills by promoting faster but potentially less thoughtful programming. Finally, he reflects on the shift from traditional coding, highlighting the value of returning to basic coding tasks to rediscover the joy of pure algorithmic programming, away from the complexity of modern integrated development environments and pre-written frameworks.

There can’t be much brain there to rot if it’s still using Microsoft products.