Thanks, Grant! My apologies from sidetracking you from this great plan.
I guess you won't be surprised when I see things like that I immediately think "how can I make the GUI work better so he doesn't advocate disabling the 'new toys'?" especially since they are new. Robby On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:26 PM, Grant Rettke <gret...@acm.org> wrote: > Hi, > > FWIW I just wanted to over-communicate something... > > I really love Racket and DrRacket. It doesn't matter how I feel > though, what matter is that Racket and the team and their approaches > have delivered, you have evidence, it doesn't matter what any of us > "think" or "feel". > > That said, I and most of my friends/colleagues/acquaintances are > coming not from academia as a career, and we are not college students > either, most professional software developers looking at Racket are > coming from the industry, so how we react to DrRacket is likely not to > be as intended... and what I hear everyone keep saying is that we > should use Emacs because DrRacket is aimed at students. I disagree. > > I feel like DrRacket is a perfect sweet spot in between VI and Emacs. > You can set it up in 5m. It has debugger and editor and all the things > people want. You can extend it using the build in extensibility > framework if you like. To me it seems all very thoughtful and nice. > That said, as a brand new user all the "power" as I phrased it didn't > jump out at me. That is just me and how my brain works, totally > subjective. That said, my peers also have the same reaction. Even > other Schemers look at it and don't "get it". The default behavior > even of opening files in a new windows... people find it baffling in > the light of having a tabbed editor in DrRacket and it makes people > upset and confused... exactly what they don't need during > "Introduction to Racket". > > So, what I published was an attempt to get people to take 10 minutes > and see 80% of the commands they would use all the time because for > all the greatness of the language when people new do it end up with > tons of unbalanced parens they end up hating it. Yes I know that you > can enter balanced parens and even wrap s-exprs... but new users do > not know that. That is all I was trying to do was to share what I > learned from everyone here helping me and showing me what was > valuable. Everybody, and in particular Robby and Eli answered my > stupid questions over the years and I just made a web page with a > little cheat sheet. > > I'm not trying to push people one way or another, other than to have a > pleasant experience editing with DrRacket. There are no "how to > actually use this" tutorials out there for folks who have never seen > any Lisp before, nothing else like that out there right now, there is > nothing that tells you specifically what combination of things in what > example and what usage to do something useful in 15m. Yes there is > HtDP and SICP and the list goes on... but what most people want is how > to deal with the details of when the tires hit the pavement and you > really skin your knuckles on the toolchain. This is what non-students > want, at least that is what I wanted, and it never existed, so I > created it in a tiny way. That is the big mystery question "Why don't > people love Racket?" isn't it? I don't know but what I saw was people > getting frustrated and this was my attempt at offering a solution. I > think that is called participating in the community, but it all > depends, and there are no silver bullets. > > Long live Racket, happy Thanksgiving, thanks for Racket! ;) > > On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:17 PM, Robby Findler > <ro...@eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote: >> The contract information doesn't change based on the mouse, fwiw. >> >> Robby >> >> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Jordan Johnson <j...@fellowhuman.com> wrote: >>> I'm curious what the objectionable distraction is: the mere presence of the >>> arrow, or the action of the arrow's window with contract info popping in and >>> out as you mouse over identifiers? >>> >>> If it's the latter, than perhaps it would help to just put more of a delay >>> (as tooltips have) in before exposing the contract info. (I'm trying to >>> figure out why *I* haven't found it a distraction, and maybe it's just >>> because I don't use the mouse very much.) >>> >>> Best, >>> jmj >>> -- >>> Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. >>> >>> Grant Rettke <gret...@acm.org> wrote: >>>> >>>> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 6:29 PM, Nadeem Abdul Hamid <nad...@acm.org> >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Grant Rettke <gret...@acm.org> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> You are an accomplished programmer that got this far without online >>>>>> compilation that was added this year? >>>>> >>>>> Well, I don't know about others, but prior to that becoming available, I >>>>> would often have to keep hitting the "Check syntax" button or key command >>>>> manually. Online compilation is just DrRacket continuously running "Check >>>>> Syntax" for you so you don't have to manually do that - and it *is* very >>>>> convenient and smoothes out the development >>>>> process, reducing a distraction >>>>> that is otherwise present. >>>> >>>> >>>> Maybe this would help, I have only used Check Syntax two or three >>>> times ever when I wanted to rename a variable because it was used in >>>> more than 5 places. What other problems does it solve? >>>> >>>>> Other industrial-strength IDEs (e.g. Eclipse, MS >>>>> VS, IBM's Java Visual-something- I forget the name) all provide this >>>>> feature >>>>> of continuous background syntax analysis to enable various types of >>>>> refactorings and code navigation. >>>> >>>> >>>> Yea that is nice. My original question was about how to remove the >>>> arrows and the thing in the upper right hand corner, and the solution >>>> was to disable online compilation. Is there way just to remove that >>>> stuff but keep the online compilation stuff? >>>> >>>>> Another nice thing about online >>>>> compilation is the additional feature of being able to view snippets of >>>>> function signatures (i.e. help) right in the corner of the editor. >>>> >>>> >>>> That arrow is so distracting. Can we move it into the status line on the >>>> bottom? >>>> >>>> Thanks for explaining why you value it. >>>> ____________________ >>>> Racket Users list: >>>> http://lists.racket-lang.org/users > > > > -- > Grant Rettke | ACM, AMA, COG, IEEE > gret...@acm.org | http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/ > Wisdom begins in wonder. > ((λ (x) (x x)) (λ (x) (x x))) > > ____________________ > Racket Users list: > http://lists.racket-lang.org/users ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
