A million years ago when I used to work at Autodesk, I worked with a terrific coder named Andy who made up a little "Powered by Notepad" graphic to show off that he could write great code "by hand" instead of relying on IDEs.

It was funny, and a manly flex. Keep in mind this was just after the turn of the millennium. So, any of us who were programming at the time were just recently starting to have APIs and sophisticated design environments like VisualStudio available to us. Most of our coding was not very sophisticated at the time.


Notepad vs. IDE's around 2000

Though it was more advanced than programming in Basic in the 1980's, there were real limitations to IDE's at the time. There was no IntelliSense (automated, intelligent pre-typing). You had breakpoints but often there were no helpful debugging error messages.

You had to be careful about formatting while writing things yourself in XML and HTML files.

Was this character building? Yes. Has this paid off over the years with an understanding of the how's and why's of various languages and standards? A few times. But would I advise a newbie programmer to learn how to write Python on C++ code in a flat text file? Nope.


Web Development in 2000

I started writing HTML code in the 90's when it was generally a manual exercise. And doing that has helped me since at times when I've written code that generates HTML - that’s a unique situation but one where the institutional knowledge of the old days of doing it the hard way actually helped me.

But once they developed drop-and-drag WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors like DreamWeaver and Microsoft FrontPage, it would have been crazy to continue with something like Notepad. Crazy, time-consuming and unprofessional.


Why Doing It The Hard Way Is Good For You

Sure, text editor code writing gave more flexibility and less environment-dependent than IDE solutions.

And I definitely got a chance to learn the foundations of computing. To this day, I have a better idea of the "why" and "why not" of code solutions & also errors. The same can be said of having to execute a compile or build script.


Pointless

But let's face it, those are pretty limited arguments in favor of being "powered by Notepad".

Even Textpad has intellisense and error-catching features if you want to go super lightweight and not be trapped by the particulars of an IDE like VisualStudio.


Parallels to A.I.

Now here's where it gets tricky, thinking of A.I. as just another tool like VisualStudio. I still have to type or copy and paste the right things in VisualStudio.

Having A.I. write your code and just deploying it with no review or modifications is dangerous. First of all, when something needs revisitng, how do you change the code if you don't understand it.

It makes me think of a quote from Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) sets John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) straight on what he's done:

"Don't you see the danger, John, in what you're doing here? Genetic force is the most awesome power the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that found his dad's gun. I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here. It didn't acquire any discipline to attain it. You read what others have done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself so therefore you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew it you had it."

The Takeaway

While it's nice to have institutional knowledge of the old days and that still helps every once in a while - especially if you have to deal with a lot of "brown-field" projects.

But the modern world expects more code in a shorter amount of time than the old tools can deliver, whether we're talking about IDE's twenty years ago or artificial intelligence now. Let's just remember that institutional knowledge counts for something and let's raise a toast to those of us who used to code in simple text editors. Or to those guys working with punch cards in IBM labs in the 1960s.