Visual Studio Gets Achievements, Badges, Leaderboards

bonch writes "Microsoft has introduced a gamification plugin for Visual Studio that lets users win achievements and badges as they compete on leaderboards by writing code. The full list of achievements includes gems like 'Go To Hell' for using goto, and 'Potty Mouth' for using five different curses in one file. This is another example of Gamification, one of the latest trends to hit social media."

"Gamification" doesn't make dull things a game...

[Anonymous Coward]

It just makes them dull things with out of place social media gimmicks.

As a gamer, I am not pleased with this trend.

Good idea

[XrayJunkie]

I find this idea quite nice. Encourage people to have some fun while programming (boring stuff). This wont result in bad code. The gain for MS: create an account to store and publish your achievements.

Possible badges for good code

[tucuxi]

I for one would find these badges nice:

• compiled without warnings (cumulative for "N times in a row")
• doxygen-compliant comment coverage (percentage-wise cumulative)
• safe programming practices (always compares constant == lvalue, initializes all values, ...)

On the other hand, IDEs like Netbeans and Eclipse are getting better and better at nagging users about such issues (and auto-generating code to fix many of them). Do we really need the badges?

FUN! With programming and Achievements!?!?

[Etrahkad]

WTF is my first reaction. Second reaction is that that would have been awesome to work on the team that built that in because it shows that they have a bit more freedom with what goes in a program like Visual Studio. This sounds like a progressive step forward in the engineering team @ Microsoft. I can't give them kudos for this _exact_ application of listening to programmers but the idea that people are allowing for ownership and creativity is gratifying to see in a development firm. Its something different than the boring troll of debugging the application, fixing build errors, and building more.

Re:I've been trying to recover from decades of hat

[Olix]

I'm 22 and I think this sounds pretty cool. I'm already addicted to achievements in videogames, why not be addicted to achievements in programming, too?

It's like the drug dealers who gave out free samples of crack with the heroin they sold.

Re:I've been trying to recover from decades of hat

[geekoid]

I'm many decades past 15 and this looks awesome.

If you stopped and looked around for moment instead of assume you know what's going on you would realize how powerful achievements are. There are many, many good outcomes to this. The biggest will be more knowledgeable and experience developers.

You can't have been around that long if you think this is MS Bob.
That said, MSBob had a great start, but someone future wife was put in charge and basically managed it to shit.

Re:I miss GOTO...there I said it

[Twylite]

Mmm. Yes. Very good class. Let's try again shall we?

Judicious use of GOTO can dramatically simplify resource cleanup when exception handling is not supported

And what is finally? That's right, it's part of the exception handling system. The concept of a "finally block" only makes sense if there are multiple paths by which the block can be reached (the normal path and the exceptional path); otherwise it would just be a statement at the end of the normal path.

Now, what about C? This is an important question because there are still (shock, horror!) some embedded environments that don't have a Java runtime environment. Why not, you may ask? Because they have 2kb code space and 512b memory!

So, what about C? Well, it doesn't have exception handling built in (more shock, more horror!). Instead, C programmers must check the result of each function call and branch to cleanup block if the result indicated an error.

</condescending >

Re:I miss GOTO...there I said it

[blueg3]

Parent is actually combining two different "this". Functions that don't need the full calling system can use an alternate fast calling system that's less expensive. Optimizing compilers can do this automatically. Separately, small functions (or functions called once, or non-small functions) can be inlined, usually automatically. It's usually documented in the compiler optimization options [gnu.org], for one.

Re:Possible badges for good code

[anonymov]

if(x = 1) // Valid in many languages and most probably not what you want. Compile warning in some compilers
if(1 = x) // Doesn't compile