This thoughtful and entertaining rant by Charles Petzold is about programming with your bare hands rather than relying on tools that force you to program in a bad way. Along the way, he writes about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Microsoft's programming tool Visual Studio.

Some observers of our digital lives have noticed the way in which certain applications cause a user to think in very rigid prescribed ways, and these are not good. One of the biggest offenders, of course, is PowerPoint. Start putting what you want to communicate in PowerPoint slides, and everything you want to say is ordered into half a dozen bullet items.

The critiques of technology we see in the movies seem to use metaphors of power or slavery. I think there’s a more proper metaphor for our relationships with much of modern consumer technology, however, and that metaphor is addiction.