>> Uhuh. And now open Word, type a few sentences, apply some minimal 
>> formatting to it, and behold as an animated paperclip pops up and says 
>> "Hey! That looks like you're trying to type a letter! Are you so 
>> retarded that you can't figure out how to do that properly all by 
>> yourself, or should I just **** off and let you get on with what you 
>> were trying to do in the first place?" 
> 
> Because unlike some systems, MS designs things to be usable both by 
> casual customers and expert customers. For the most part, at least. That 
> the paperclip offers to help out doesn't mean the system is useless to 
> experts, which is what you were contending.

The paperclip at least can be disabled. The other unecessary 
helpy-helper features seem to be unavoidable. (E.g., Word tries to 
automatically format your text based on text you've recently typed. Even 
if you expressedly don't want it to. It insists on correcting 
capitalisation, even if you don't want it to. And so on.)

It's just so frustrating that there is no way to make M$ software do 
what you tell it to do, rather than what it thinks you want it to do. 
Computers are hopeless at figuring out what humans want!

>> Is this somehow not the case? Or have they made VS more flexible now?
> 
> You can certainly still use the command line if you want.

Sure, but... you can do that for free. Presumably if you paid hundreds 
of dollars for an IDE, you actually want to... I don't know... use the IDE?

>> 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.
> 
> Not necessarily. It gets everybody working the same way, which is good. 

I can see some value in that I guess.

> Since I can't guess what problems your hyperbole refers to, I couldn't 
> guess whether they fixed it or not.

It insists that your files must be arranged in a certain way. It insists 
that your code must have a specific layout. It insists on autogenerating 
buckets of code that you then have to manually delete. It insists on 
inserting dummy comments here and there. And so on.

It must be really hard if you decide you want to use some sort of 
revision control, since the fixed file layout has human-written source 
code muddled up with VS configuration files, autogenerated cache files, 
object files, and so on.

On the other hand, maybe for a really large project it's not so much of 
an issue. Maybe it's just that all this boilerplate is massively 
overkill for a project consisting of 6 Java classes totalling about 200 
lines?

>>> You can code Excel and Word...all without any programming.
>> Uh... really? Isn't that kinda contradictory? :-D
> 
> It depends on what you mean by "code". Can you build a spreadsheet 
> without coding? If so, you can load the cells from a SQL server without 
> coding.

That makes more sense. ;-)

>> 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.
> 
> And if you want to iterate over all the elements in a list in Haskell 
> and apply your function to them, good luck figuring out it's called 
> "map" without having read a book about functional programming first.

Sure. Haskell has lame documentation. This is not news. OTOH, Haskell 
doesn't cost hundreds of dollars either.

> The help file isn't to teach you every feature of the system. Stuff is 
> too complex for that these days.

POV-Ray's manual teaches you every feature of the system. And I don't 
mean it just gives you a list of all the commands and what they do, it 
actually *teaches* you the complete system, in a coherant way.

As far as I can tell, no such documentation exists for any M$ product. 
They all come with a help file, but generally these only cover the 
blindingly obvious. Again the assumption is that the person operating 
the computer is a moron. I find this irritating and insulting.

> You either look it up on MSDN, or you 
> buy a book, or you go to a class, or something like that.

It seems that if you want to know anything remotely "technical" about M$ 
products, the only way to find out is to go on a course. I find this 
very objectionable. I've paid money for this product, why can't you just 
tell me how to operate it? Why must I now pay even more money?

Also, FWIW, I went on an M$ course once. It was a waste of time. There 
was almost no technical content to it. It was all "click this button, 
fill in this box, now click that button..." Apparently if you want to 
actually get technical detail, you have to go on yet *another* course. 
(I wonder how many courses you have to take before you really know what 
you're talking about?)

> The man page for GCC doesn't tell you how to program, either.

Because that's not specific to GCC. *Every* C compiler accepts the same 
source code as input. I'll bet the GCC manpage tells you what all the 
GCC-specific options and switches do though.

> However, entering "set cell to today's date" in help brings back "Inser 
> the current date and time in a cell" as the first hit, and "date and 
> time functions" as the second hit, so I'm not sure what you're looking 
> for there.

Well, last time I tried, I wasted about 4 days wandering through the VBA 
help looking for the name of the VB functions and properties for 
accessing a cell in a worksheet, and finding out what today's date is. 
The actual code is not remotely complex, but it took *days* to track 
down the magic command names. It really was ridiculously hard.

Let us not even go into the fact that I only know VBA exists by complete 
accident. It's not like there's anything anywhere that explains what 
this stuff is. Fortunately, VB's syntax is sufficiently simple that you 
can mostly guess how it works - again, I don't see a syntax description 
anywhere.

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