“Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy”

That’s the popup I keep getting now and then. I don’t know what is it busy with. Fighting cancer, solving world hunger or fixing capitalism? Honestly, I don’t even care. I think the primary goal of any IDE is to help my make software, so when the Studio says it’s busy, it’s more like loitering to me.

Anyway. I’ve been into software development for a while. I suppose my first IDE was QuickBasic. It ran smoothly on 4.7 MHz Intel 8088 processor, but of course I never tried it on millions lines of code. Then there was Turbo C, Borland C++, Delphi, VS6, Code Warrior, Eclipse, VS 2010, xCode, Code::Blocks and now I get to whine about VS 2015 getting catatonic on my shining fresh PC with i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM on board.

I’ve seen lots of IDE. I watched them grow for more than 20 years now. And I can witness that in terms of non-functional requirements it gets worse every year. Sure, modern Studio has lots of nice features. I love its embedded History, and Annotate, and how it reconciles my work space for me. But the performance is a joke. And it eats an amount of memory enough to feed thousand of hungry Vims. It just gets worse every release faster than hardware gets better.

And of course it’s not only IDEs. Basically all the consumer grade software gets more and more gluttonous just like Moor’s law is still in act. It’s not so anymore, but somehow software quality still keeps getting worse. It’s like someone is deliberately teaching all the engineers how not to care about their job. And you know what’s really weird? I never saw a book that says “Learn How to Suck at Java” or “Worst Practices of Software Architecture”. Somehow they are all about doing thing better. They suppose to teach you how to excel in your craft.

Well, apparently it’s not working very well.

At this point I should of reveal you the greatest secret of software engineering. Tell you the one and only truth that will revolutionize the industry. Bring the light to the deepest mysteries of programming.

Not going to happen. Sorry, I have no idea what is fundamentally wrong in the industry and how to fix it. I believe no one does. If there were such a thing: a tool, a methodology, a language, a two horned unicorn or a philosopher stone, Microsoft would have bought it long time ago to make their major product less busy fighting wales, or whatever it does, and more busy doing what it was purchased for.