[squeak-dev] open paren/brace/bracket...

Nicolas Cellier nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com
Thu Apr 17 23:11:16 UTC 2014


2014-04-18 0:56 GMT+02:00 Colin Putney <colin at wiresong.com>:

>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Some people like to "edit text" and some people like to "edit
>> expressions".  Personally, I find "editing text" pretty old-school,
>> and a lot more tedious.
>>
>
> You know, I bet this boils down to a simple cost-benefit analysis. For me,
> the effort required to
> type a character at the cursor position is negligible, so saving that
> effort is of little benefit. Even
> in cases where I will need to put a $) after the expression I'm typing
> now, sometimes I'll have to
> type right-arrow to get past it. So the benefit is very small and often
> offset by a small loss.
>
> Similarly, deleting an unwanted character is cheap, but deciding whether
> to do so is a huge cost.
> I have to stop thinking about what I'm doing, and think ahead to what I'm
> going to do next. Even
> if I know I'm going to need the closing character, it stays in my field of
> view and takes up cycles
> as a pending thing that I have to worry about until I complete the encoded
> expression.
>
> So, the benefit is small and unreliable, while the cost is large and
> inevitable. It forces me to think
> about typing, which normally I don't have to do. Thus, it's infuriating.
>
> However, that calculus is very personal. If typing a character took, say,
> 10x longer, or I had to look
> at the keyboard to find the character, the benefit would be much more
> significant. Also, if I had to
> think about where the keys are, then deciding whether or not to delete the
> character wouldn't be
> an interruption; it would just get folded into the "thinking about typing"
> that I'd do.
>
> So it probably has more to do with how fast we type than how we think
> about coding or "editing
> text" or even familiarity.
>
> Colin
>
>
> Very well said.
Typing text is not only pretty old-school, it can be pretty low level too.
Forcing us to think (high level) during a low level activity is pretty
disrupting, upsetting and inefficient.
That's precisely why I got exactly the same repulsion to these automated
help that constantly break my own automated flow...
Maybe we could train ourselves and adapt to these auto-enclose, but this
will then break our flow anywhere outside Squeak, so I simply do not wish
to.

Nicolas
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