c#Okay, I'm slooooowly getting my head wrapped around Microsoft's new whiz bang and conveniently free XNA studio. It's....okay. I have to accustom myself to C# which is one of those languages designed to prevent people from making programming mistakes by removing their ability to write programs. No worries, however. That's my old crusty C programmer speaking. The environment you do all of this in, however, automates some things I've wanted automated for literally years. I had a nerdgasm the first time I renamed a class by right clicking in the solution explorer window and just selecting an option to rename a class and watching it refactor all of my code for me. I had my ~second~ nerdgasm when it let me do this with a source file name. It constantly points out errors with a red underline as soon as you type them.
But! The default setup on this thing is in some ways just atrocious.
It, like Processing, highlights bookending parentheses and brackets for you. This is, on the surface, is a Very Useful Thing. You put the cursor next to a parenthesis or bracket and it highlights that parenthesis and its corresponding partner. And, should you fail to properly bookend parentheses or brackets, it underlines them in red. Problem is, when it 'highlight' a pair, it does so by making them white, with a bright gray background. This most inconveniently COMPLETELY OBSCURES the cursor, the place where you type in text, the ONLY THING you ever keep your eyes on while typing in code. I mean, the cursor DISAPPEARS, and your brain goes "Uh, hey, where is the cursor? I had all this perceptive hardware trained on it and all this cognitive capacity tracking it and it just blinked out of existence." And this is disconcerting to your brain on a low level, when things it has learned to automatically track blink out of existence. And then another part of your brain has to ~remember~ where you last saw it and tell that other part of your brain "It's right there, next to that parenthesis that's rendered on the light gray background." And this gets tiring. And there's another thing about this. Years of using Windows has taught me that highlighted text is selected text, and that when I press a key when some text it highlighted, the selected text is deleted and replaced with what I type. So, my brain also has to remind itself that when I type the next letter, nothing will be replaced. More "having to consciously think" type stuff.
What prompted this post was that a few minutes ago, even though I've written numerous loops already, I typed "foreach" to signify that I'm writing a loop, and suddenly and without warning it finished the loop structure for me, minus the variable names I have to provide. And of course this text was highlighted with a bright background that made it unreadable. Of course. I continue typing and for some reason this just pushes the highlighted (supposed) "helper" text on towards the end of the line. So I wind up having to manually delete the "helper" text that the IDE "helpfully" inserted to remind me how a loop looks. Thanks, yeah, I can write a loop all on my own, I'm a big boy now!
ANYTIME you start typing a new word, it feels compelled to throw up an autocomplete window, which digs down to words that match what you're typing as you type. Um, okay, yeah, I can remember just fine that "public" is a word in the language, I've been typing it for years in C++. That's not annoying in and of itself, here's the annoying part. If you completely finish typing the word the autocomplete box popped up to "help" you complete, the box just sits there dumbly. If you press the tab key, the box goes away. I, however, often press the tab key to, you know, insert a tab into the text. So I type "public", then I press the tab key to tab over so I can start typing the name of the thing that is public. But instead of inserting a tab into the code, it just makes the box I didn't need in the first place go away. So when I start typing the identifier, it begins immediately after the "public" keyword, and I have to go back and manually separate my identifier from the keyword because my press of the tab key did not do what I expected it to. I can press escape to remove the box, or I can just train myself to remember that I have to press tab twice now. So, in the act of trying to automatically help me, it's actually created MORE work for me. Wow.
I'm not ~opposed~ to the features I've outlined. I think they are highly useful for some people, beginners and novices. I have no doubt they can be disabled, I'll just have to go and find out where and how they get disabled. But I have to wonder, did they do any usability testing on this at all? The thing that bugs me is, nobody who was testing these features spoke up to say, well, what I've said here. Somebody thought hiding the cursor with a highlighted background was a perfectly good idea. Heck, somebody thought text with a highlighted background that renders the ~text~ unreadable was a good idea? Who thinks that? *sigh* Okay, rant over. Now I'm going to go familiarize myself with the tools->options menu.
But! The default setup on this thing is in some ways just atrocious.
It, like Processing, highlights bookending parentheses and brackets for you. This is, on the surface, is a Very Useful Thing. You put the cursor next to a parenthesis or bracket and it highlights that parenthesis and its corresponding partner. And, should you fail to properly bookend parentheses or brackets, it underlines them in red. Problem is, when it 'highlight' a pair, it does so by making them white, with a bright gray background. This most inconveniently COMPLETELY OBSCURES the cursor, the place where you type in text, the ONLY THING you ever keep your eyes on while typing in code. I mean, the cursor DISAPPEARS, and your brain goes "Uh, hey, where is the cursor? I had all this perceptive hardware trained on it and all this cognitive capacity tracking it and it just blinked out of existence." And this is disconcerting to your brain on a low level, when things it has learned to automatically track blink out of existence. And then another part of your brain has to ~remember~ where you last saw it and tell that other part of your brain "It's right there, next to that parenthesis that's rendered on the light gray background." And this gets tiring. And there's another thing about this. Years of using Windows has taught me that highlighted text is selected text, and that when I press a key when some text it highlighted, the selected text is deleted and replaced with what I type. So, my brain also has to remind itself that when I type the next letter, nothing will be replaced. More "having to consciously think" type stuff.
What prompted this post was that a few minutes ago, even though I've written numerous loops already, I typed "foreach" to signify that I'm writing a loop, and suddenly and without warning it finished the loop structure for me, minus the variable names I have to provide. And of course this text was highlighted with a bright background that made it unreadable. Of course. I continue typing and for some reason this just pushes the highlighted (supposed) "helper" text on towards the end of the line. So I wind up having to manually delete the "helper" text that the IDE "helpfully" inserted to remind me how a loop looks. Thanks, yeah, I can write a loop all on my own, I'm a big boy now!
ANYTIME you start typing a new word, it feels compelled to throw up an autocomplete window, which digs down to words that match what you're typing as you type. Um, okay, yeah, I can remember just fine that "public" is a word in the language, I've been typing it for years in C++. That's not annoying in and of itself, here's the annoying part. If you completely finish typing the word the autocomplete box popped up to "help" you complete, the box just sits there dumbly. If you press the tab key, the box goes away. I, however, often press the tab key to, you know, insert a tab into the text. So I type "public", then I press the tab key to tab over so I can start typing the name of the thing that is public. But instead of inserting a tab into the code, it just makes the box I didn't need in the first place go away. So when I start typing the identifier, it begins immediately after the "public" keyword, and I have to go back and manually separate my identifier from the keyword because my press of the tab key did not do what I expected it to. I can press escape to remove the box, or I can just train myself to remember that I have to press tab twice now. So, in the act of trying to automatically help me, it's actually created MORE work for me. Wow.
I'm not ~opposed~ to the features I've outlined. I think they are highly useful for some people, beginners and novices. I have no doubt they can be disabled, I'll just have to go and find out where and how they get disabled. But I have to wonder, did they do any usability testing on this at all? The thing that bugs me is, nobody who was testing these features spoke up to say, well, what I've said here. Somebody thought hiding the cursor with a highlighted background was a perfectly good idea. Heck, somebody thought text with a highlighted background that renders the ~text~ unreadable was a good idea? Who thinks that? *sigh* Okay, rant over. Now I'm going to go familiarize myself with the tools->options menu.
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