At 01:53 PM 5/4/2006, Robert Cummings wrote:
Direct memory access beats secondary helper memory every time.
Autocomplete is an incentive to have a lazy mind. When your brain has a
larger overall picture of available resources, it can formulate better
strategies than when it only has part of the picture. Additionally, when
you are typing out a flow of code, anything that interrupts that flow
slows you down... ala autocomplete.
Surely you must realize this varies with individual psychology. If
using autocomplete makes your mind lazy and interrupts your flow,
then I'm happy that you avoid its use. But please don't assume that
others share these limitations. It would be impossible for me to get
any more physically lazy than I already am but mentally I'm a
vertiable locomotive. Using autocomplete doesn't promote mental
laziness in me, personally, so I think I'm safe from the slippery
slope you avoid so assiduously.
I'm a stubborn old hand-coder. I won't use WYSIWYG editors because I
want to be in complete control of the markup and styling
decisions. Now if you were to argue that WYSIWYG editors could make
a person lazy, I'd agree, because in my experience they allow you to
give vague directives and in response produce precise code. I want
to choose the goddam pixel widths, thank you very much.
Autocomplete's a different thing entirely, it's more like selecting
from a combo list by typing the initial letters of your choice. It
doesn't decide what to enter based on vague direction from the human,
it supplies precisely what the human wants but with fewer
keystrokes. Maybe the DreamWeaver folks will tell me that DW can be
tuned to be similarly responsive and not presumptuous, but as far as
I know I can tell WYSIWYG markup when I see it, fat and clotted,
anything but spare, and too often downright silly.
I blush to confess that I use Visual Studio (the only useful thing I
came away with from a brief, unhappy romance with .Net a few years
back) as a fancy text-editor (rather like driving the 747 to the
supermarket, but shucks I own it now and the gas mileage is zip) and
I permit its autocomplete feature to run in CSS and HTML editing modes.
I always know precisely what I want to type, autocomplete doesn't do
any thinking for me whatsoever, so I'm in no danger of becoming
intellectually slothful through its use. What it does do is allow me
to select terms from a list as an alternative to typing them in
whole. When I'm really sailing it speeds up my work and increases my
precision. Autocomplete doesn't interrupt me at all -- often I type
happily on without regard to the fact that it's offering me choices
as I type. Every typo I make that I don't catch while coding wastes
a minimum of a couple minutes of my time and often much
more. There's nothing that dulls the intellect more than being stuck
in a proofreading/debugging/reloading cycle.
In HTML editing mode, VS supplies a closing tag as soon as I close an
opening tag, saving me tons of typing and decreasing the frequency
with which I omit a closure. I hate software that inaccurately
anticipates my needs (a Microsoft specialty), but this one feature is
very handy. For me it's a tool, not a crutch.
...Why am I enabling such an OT thread on a PHP list? Quick someone shoot me.
Back to work,
Paul
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