On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:22:30 -0800, tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
Many browsers open at once solves that problem much more effectively.
I find that I: a) run out of screen space quickly; b) need to revert to the mouse to switch browsers; c) if I try solve (a) by collapsing, I end up with even more mouse clicks at (b). Maybe there's a hot-key for switching conveniently that I'm missing, but in my experience ST is pretty keyboard hostile.
Something like what John Hyland describes--stack based, so that the window shows the latest methods you've been working on--seems like it would be very useful, and having a single screen of code (that could actually be debugged, so you could look at how the code moves without the visually distracting flipping that occurs) would be very useful for teaching.
Conceptually, this wouldn't even need to be that different from the regular browser, really, just a browser that showed code from more than one method at once.
Jason Johnson wrote:
"Just an observation of human nature. Someone comes into something new and assumes it's just like something else they know and can be used the same way. They hit little bumps here and there but not enough to make them stop and think. It's not until the crash into a brick wall that they stop and either (a) assume this new thing sucks, leave it and never look back or (b) realize maybe things are different here and go out and learn the new thing."
You say this almost like it's a bad thing. It's only bad when people do (a), and if they do (a) anyway, moving the brick wall up so that they hit it right at the beginning makes it more likely that they're going to think that it sucks, because there's not enough time for anything new to insinuate itself in to their thought processes.
I love Smalltalk: It's informed my programming for 15 years now. But it does not suit the way I work at all. I write tiny little routines and objects in all the languages I work in (even in procedural languages) but I can write a lot more a lot quicker if I don't have to take my hands off the keyboard.
===Blake===