Darren New wrote:

> Their IDEs are some of the best out there.

Since I haven't used any recent M$ IDE, I don't feel I'm qualified to 
comment on that.

10 years ago I used J++ Visual Studio. It sucked. Massively. But then, 
so did the OS it was running on, and they have at least improved that 
somewhat, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps this has changed now, but back when I used VS, it *insisted* 
that you work in precisely the way that the program's designers 
envisiged, and if you try to structure your work in any other way, the 
IDE fights you every single step of the way. For a 1-man programming 
project such as the things I worked on, it's merely irritating to have 
to bend my working habits to accomodate the IDE. But I'm curios... for a 
large project featuring a vast codebase and dozens if not hundreds of 
programmers, I would think such cast-iron inflexibility would be a 
massive, potentially show-stopping issue.

Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?

> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.

Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D

> Hell, their word processor is powerful enough to have macros that are 
> viruses.

Perhaps by "powerful" you mean "not throught out correctly"? :-P

Heck, there's no way in hell anybody would ever think of writing a virus 
for such an absurd platform as POV-Ray - and yet, it has strict 
antiviral features, enabled by default. And it had them from day 1. And 
there wasn't even a paid designer!

Still, for me the best feature has to be that they spent all this time 
designing a macro system, and then didn't bother to document it. Before 
you jump down my throat... yes, I *realise* that if you want to know why 
MyFooFunction() does, it's trivial to look it up. But if you want to 
find out what function will, say, change cell D7 to today's date... good 
luck figuring that out from the minimal helpfile.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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