Hi Alex,
yes I like that I can tell a kid "type 'box' and see what happens" and I'm done with the first explanation, I think it's less cognitive load for the user.
Also I love that I can tweak the numbers and things change immediately - it's a sort of "value scrubbing" (which in fact I would like to put in place if I had the time, which ain't gonna happen in the current life).
It's true, one has to design the language to avoid the tricky-prefixes situation, but it's not that difficult. A temporary side effect that lasts the duration of a keystroke is rarely catastrophic. Sloppy behaviour is OK, my mantra is "we are not building autocad".
Also, I kind of like the idea that I get the "by word" behaviour as a subset of the mechanism already in place, there is something self-indulgingly elegant in that.
Cheers,
D
On 14 Aug 2013, at 20:52, alex <alex_at_slab.org> wrote:
> Nice insights, Davide!
>
> On 5 August 2013 12:04, Davide Della Casa <davidedc_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> There is no CTRL-enter or shift-enter, no "play button" - the program just
>> runs while typed. If you want to suspend the evaluation of the program
>> temporarily, just add a simple syntax error (like a slash somewhere it
>> shouldn't be, or an unbalanced parenthesis), and then remove that syntax
>> error when happy.
>>
>> We could have made use of an explicit play/pause button, but we are trying
>> to see whether we can dispense of that "modality".
>
> I just wanted to pick up on this.. I experimented with this early on
> with feedback.pl, but dismissed it straight away as impractical.
> Perhaps this was partly to do with Perl though, maybe it has more
> keywords which are prefixes of other keywords.. But I remember not
> wanting to worry about the order in which I wrote things, etc. As you
> describe it, it seems to add extra cognitive load, for no clear gain.
>
> Basically, for me a "single edit" of a piece of code is very rarely a
> keypress, but a word, or a larger structure.
>
> Have you found any good reasons to stick with the keypress-as-edit approach?
>
> Cheers
>
> alex
>
Received on Tue Sep 03 2013 - 15:06:58 BST