Well, maybe not. But this article by Charles Petzold is a clearly-articulated discussion of some of the dangerous trends that most programmers aren’t even cognizant of. His discussion is centered around Microsoft, Visual Studio, and dotNET, being that that is his area of expertise. And while there are certain similar problems that also affect other environments, I think that because of Microsoft’s goals and the goals of their tools, I think that much of this discussion is truly mostly-relevant to those deeply entrenched in Microsoft’s OS and tool stack.

So I don’t think IntelliSense is helping us become better programmers. The real objective is for us to become faster programmers, which also means that it’s cheapening our labor.

I agree. And I completely share his sentiment at the end of his dissertation, which is exactly how I feel whenever I get a chance to work with some good, old-fashioned C++/KDE code:

It’s just me and the code, and for awhile, I feel like a real programmer again.