On sketching-in-nonlinear-order, that's definitely how I write too, both code
and prose (and email!). This has implications not only for the automatic build
behavior we were discussing but also for the structure-based editing discussion
from a week or two ago. If you piece together your code in a nonlinear way then
the assumptions that structure-based editors sometimes make -- e.g. that
whenever you type "(" you want an immediately following ")" -- will usually be
wrong and it will be a nuisance to undo all of the system's "helpfulness."
-Lee
On Jul 19, 2010, at 7:11 PM, j-g-faustus wrote:
>
> I normally start out with a sketch or skeleton of the whole project,
> with multiple files and lots of partial drafts, and fill out the
> details over time (days or weeks).
> Being able to finish and test functions one by one is one of the great
> benefits of REPL-based development IMHO. I wouldn't want anything that
> forces me to have every file in a loadable state all the time.
>
> Perhaps relatedly, someone doing a usability study of how newspapers
> journalists work told me that journalists (at least the ones she were
> studying) didn't write articles by starting at the beginning and
> finishing at the end.
> Instead they wrote down snippets, sentence fragments, nifty turns of
> phrase etc. in whatever order they happened to think of them, spread
> the fragments out on the screen and copy/pasted the parts together to
> assemble a complete article.
> According to her this was a surprisingly efficient way of working,
> they could finish an article in no time compared to writing it in a
> more traditional start-to-finish fashion. Perhaps because the time you
> need to think of what to say about X can be spent to say something
> about Y.
>
> This is somewhat similar to my preferred way of working with code, I
> start out with a jumble of fragments and assemble them into complete
> code over time.
> The Java development style where you need the whole file (or even
> worse, the whole project) to compile in order to test a single method
> is a lot slower, at least for me.
--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
893 West Street, Amherst, MA 01002-3359
lspec...@hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
Phone: 413-559-5352, Fax: 413-559-5438
Check out Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines:
http://www.springer.com/10710 - http://gpemjournal.blogspot.com/
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