Oh God, not this BS again.
This has nothing to do with some such crap about “background compilation” and the merits of spell checking.
It’s about that thing that kills IT folks:
CHANGE.
You’re comfortable with the stuff you grew up on. Now someone mixes in a feature like “background compilation” and now all the people who thought getting rid of punch cards was a bad idea also think that using something like “background compilation” is akin to being a poser of the first order.
Yeesh.
I think there’s some subtle “point missing” going on here.
To make soup, you need stock. You can get stock from a box, and some of it is very good. It will never be as good as homemade stock–provided you know how to make stock, and you should.
Not all the work I do can be performed inside the comfortable, cotton-lined Visual Studio. Some of it has to be written on a Solaris box using Pico (because vi and emacs are tools of the Devil), where all that syntactic and pre-compile support isn’t available. I have to be as efficient writing in that environment as I am in Visual Studio.
Most of the time I prefer writing in Boxer or CodeWright because VS doesn’t support the Brief keyboard command set as well as it might, so I’ve never been a VS Zombie. I certainly don’t write non-ASP websites in VS, because there are better tools.
The funny thing is, I rely on HTML preview when writing web pages. Sounds a lot like precompilation, doesn’t it? The difference is, naturally, that it’s a lot faster, and only happens when I ask for it.
I would rather control the machine than have the machine control me. I don’t need some high-speed idiot telling me when I’ve made mistakes–I can find those on my own, and I’d often prefer to find them in bulk than be nickeled and dimed to death.
Foobar,
It’s about that thing that kills IT folks:
CHANGE.
No, Foobar, it isn’t at all. You’ve given me a chuckle, however, given that I had continuous automatic checking in GFA Basic on the Atari ST, circa 1988.
Maybe it’s new to you, but it certainly isn’t new to me.
Nonetheless, the whole conversation was about the craft of software development: If you’re a self-avowed code-monkey, then disregard the whole conversation (and yes, Jeff, I will certainly say that I’m not among the infinite-monkeys crew, and the assertion that denying that implied that one was is a bizarre bit of non-logic).
When you’re actually dedicated to a craft – see virtually any craftsman hobby or profession, such as tile-laying, woodworking, whatever – many of the helpers that allow a beginner to just quickly get the job done are no longer a good idea, either because they end up getting in the way or distracting more than they help, or because they undermine good habits, always helping just enough that, if misused, one never improves.
Those tiny little plastic spacers that a beginner uses to quickly tile their floor in a good-enough fashion, with limited skill, for instance – no professional tile layer in the world uses those. I just painted my kitchen, which first necessitated masking off pretty much the entire room. Do you think professional painters do that? Of course they don’t.
I can’t imagine how far this profession has descended if concern for the craft implies elitism.
““Yes, you could throw Notepad.exe and volumes 1-5 of The Art of Programming at your development team. Or you can buy them the best, most advanced development tools on the market. Which approach do you think will be more effective?””
“So subjective, “best” and “advanced” are. Let’s just begin by being very clear – Linus Torvalds does not use notepad, nor do any other top-tier hackers I’ve ever heard interviewed on this subject. Frankly, I’m sick of this ridiculous, dismissive comment. I hear it over and over again, and I can’t understand why.”
I think he was exaggerating the example to get the point across… I don’t think it had anything to do with “your editor of choice.” Perhaps you need to not get so defensive. “Looks simple” doesn’t actually mean it is simple, you and I both know this, I’m pretty certain Jeff does too.
PS, when i’m not using eclipse i code exclusively in vim
Background checking of spelling and grammar is the first thing I turn off in a new Word installation, so I’m at least consistent in my dislike of background compilation. 
Many years ago, when I was first teaching my son to use Word to write his school papers, I had to turn off background spelling and grammar checking. Those darn squiggles just flat-out stopped him from getting his thoughts down. Every time one would pop up, he’d stop writing and start correcting. Regardless, I think the comparison to compilers is specious: as another person, above, pointed out, you HAVE to compile to get your program to work. You don’t HAVE to run a spell-check to finish a paper.
I can’t believe how many people actually want the constant nagging of a back-seat driver.
“I’m actually an excellent speller, to the point that I can (and do) work without a spell checker”
What a low bar to set for oneself.
For those of us who are offended by all those ‘code monkeys’ that are continuously helping use with our work you can always break out the ol’ C++ compiler, or maybe the C compiler or better yet how about the assembler!
Get real, our job is to write software and ANYTHING that helps use do this task with greater ease and shorter delivery time is a welcomed advantage in my book.
Or to put it another way, how many times have you been right at the deadline with some stupid manager that came from marketing or sales breathing down your neck while you are trying to tie up all the little loose ends, sqaush the major bugs, deliver it on time and stay sane?
If you’ve worked in this industry for ANY length of time probably a whole lot…
Is this not almost entirely down to its implementation? Here are two (real) implementations of a back-ground spell-checker:
When a misspelled word is detected format it using the highlighter tool. Oh, and don’t wait until the user has finished typing the word. For example if you entered, say, the first three letters of “through” it should say “‘thr’ isn’t a word, I’ll highlight that.”
When I find a misspelled word format it with a wiggly red underline.
The former is in Lotus Word Pro, by the way. It made using the spell checker a grating experience. Word tells you about the probable error but makes it easy to ignore. False-positives are not a painful experience.
My guess is that many developers imagine back-ground compilation to be more like Word Pro than Word. I’d turn a system like that off too!
well, this again. The interesting part of the thread is whether we need IDEs. We don’t. The IDE was invented (Borland or M$, too long ago to recall), because DOS was too stupid to make it easy to use the editor/debugger/scc/make of preference; as one could in unix.
I still don’t use one. Slickedit for editing (it knows vi/m). Face it, what matters about the IDE is whether it makes editing easier. My fingers only understand vi (other smart people’s only emacs; I still respect them even though emacs is a direct path to carpal tunnel). The rest of an IDE is largely irrelevant. Only the debugger matters in the least, and once you get used to one you don’t want to learn another. Kind of like your editor. Most IDEs do cvs/svn. Most do ant/make. And so on.
As for the spell checking while posting to your blog, if your blog uses one of the common APIs you can use a client like ecto, which is available for both Windows and OSX (http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/).
On the compiler front, that auto compile in VB.net has saved my sorry ass too many times, it doesn’t matter how good I am at it, the feature is useful.
To me, they’re no-brainers
Err… maybe that’s the problem? 
One thing that’s coming over from the comments is that the difference between a checker that is insanely irritating and one that’s a delight to have around can be as small as whether it waits for you to type a space before doing its thing - a tiny implementation detail, but apparently crucial. Perhaps the user should be able to specify how long the feedback loop’s delay should be?
(And of course one should NEVER, EVER, EVER interrupt the user with things like modal dialogue boxes…!)
Interesting. I’ve never used VB.Net, so I never noticed I’ve been missing this. I do know that the bug-you-after-every-line nonsense in old-school VB made me so pissed I couldn’t speak, but little red squiggles seem like a nice feature.
On the other hand, it might be distracting when I try to fill in larger blocks of code – I might end up turning it off. But it’s a cool idea.
“People love background spell-checking”. Ahem:
I HATE BACKGROUND SPELL-CHECKING. I turn it off, and do a manual spell-check when my thoughts are intact “on paper”. I’m dyslexic and not a clean typist, and I just find it hard to write coherently when the computer is sticking me with a pin every few seconds. But I think it is a great feature for those who want it. Ditto background compilation.
People absolutely adore background spell checking.
Well…
We’ve had it for years and we’re used to it. We know how to ignore it. For years, i typed all letters, essays, reports, or anything else non-trivial in a simple text editor just to avoid spellchecking. The red squiggly thing was useful during editing, but terribly distracting during writing - every time i’d glance at the screen, i’d lose my train of thought and start thinking about what was misspelled…
So VB.NET’s background compilation? It doesn’t really help or hurt me, because i just ignore it most of the time. It saves me a single keystroke every few minutes when i’d normally hit Compile, but those are pretty much offset by the extra keystrokes needed to work around VB.NET’s annoyingly bad auto-indentation. As someone else mentioned though, it’s worlds better than VB6’s modal errors - those may have single-handedly kindled in me a life-long hatred of VB.
Still, i’m sure it is incredibly annoying to programmers who lack my zen-like ability to ignore what’s on the screen…
I disagree with Dennis.
I made a comment on his blog but it appears that he is carefully choosing which comments he wants to allow.
Here is a copy of the comment I made on his page, in case he denies it from showing up over there:
"And spell checking is a crutch for writers, simply a hand-holding measure for folks who are not able to write.
After all, spell checking sometimes corrects your spelling with the wrong word! A human editing process could never make this mistake.
And what about this keyboard crap? Typos didn’t exist before this bane was leashed upon the world! Clearly, this is merely a shortcut for incompetent writers to produce more poorly-written garbage.
God forbid that there is a feature that expedites the process of detecting typographical errors. I know you type perfectly all the time and don’t make minor syntax errors.
Oh wait, there is at least one in this very blog entry!
Someone who cannot see the difference between “its” and “it’s” are clearly beginners and hacks who do not deserve to write anything.
Furthermore, if you cannot master the syntax and grammar of your own, human, personal language, how can you criticize others for wanting tools that help correct typographical errors in another language?
Dennis, does it get lonely up there on that pedestal?"
Another interesting point, the HTML in your screenshot is not valid! Won’t validate (http://validator.w3.org/). Close your p 's man!
If only there was something there to point that out to you with, for example, a red squiggly line? Ahhh… If only…
Hey there TM…I assure that your comment wil be posted, however I’m accessing from a mobile device right now and can’t do that until later. The ony comments nix are hater comments, but never just because it’s an opposing perspective.
Cheers!
Ian echoed my sentiments very clearly. I can’t stand the errors that I get when I’m part way finished with typing something – they’re distractin and annoying.