It would be for me as well, but there are many people who swear by Visual Studio...

jrockway · on April 2, 2011

I've used Visual Studio at work.

The first C++ program I wrote caused the compiler to segfault. It was hello world compiled as managed code using the .net string class. The solution was to wait for the next version of Visual Studio to be approved by the Internal Software Approval Team.

I switched to Haskell + Emacs and never looked back. If you're stuck on Windows, that's a damn good development environment. Miles ahead of anything Microsoft could offer. (But visual studio lets you refactor shit by right clicking. Yeah, but Haskell lets me write code that actually works.)

apl · on April 2, 2011

  > I switched to Haskell + Emacs and never looked back. 
  > If you're stuck on Windows, that's a damn good 
  > development environment. Miles ahead of anything 
  > Microsoft could offer.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/

Yeah, Microsoft has no clue what they're doing, man.

skorgu · on April 2, 2011

Microsoft undoubtedly has a lot of smart people and a lot of fascinating research. They also have a serious problem turning that research expertise into shipped product.

apl · on April 2, 2011

Sure, and they have that problem across the board. The Courier concept art is a fairly recent example.

But a comment praising Haskell as an experience that Microsoft can't rival while 85% of the Haskell team are on Microsoft's payroll? Too tempting.

MortenK · on April 2, 2011

So you were at a competency level where you couldn't get Hello world to work, switched to another language and based on that, conclude that your choice of language plus editor is miles ahead of anything MS could offer?

alextingle · on April 2, 2011

I think he said that the MS toolchain was incapable of compiling a simple hello world program. How did you make the mental leap from that to questioning his competence??

waterlesscloud · on April 2, 2011

I don't think it's much of a leap to question the programmer rather than the compiler when "Hello World" won't compile.

Maybe it's the compiler, but there would need to be some evidence that it was so before I went with that option.

jrockway · on April 2, 2011

We called Microsoft and they said, "yeah, don't use managed C++ in this version of VS."

kenjackson · on April 3, 2011

People ported Quake II to managed C++ and you can't get "Hello World" to work? No offense, but it's you.

http://www.vertigosoftware.com/Quake2.htm

jarek · on April 2, 2011

Was this in 2003?

MortenK · on April 3, 2011

It's more like a mental babystep. If you are not able to compile Hello world in a given toolchain, that says more about your competence with that particular toolchain, than it does about the toolchain itself.

praptak · on April 2, 2011

> I switched to Haskell + Emacs and never looked back.

Uhm, yeah, I did that too. It linked seamlessly with the rest of the codebase (C++), the colleagues were delighted to maintain my Haskell code (after all Haskell is so much better.) In fact the effects were so good that the company rewarded me by turning me into a unicorn.