On Sun, 2023-07-02 at 10:41 -0700, Jeremy French wrote:
> Scrolling in code is bad - a necessary evil, obviously, but evil
> nonetheless. Vertical scrolling is bad because it causes what we
> were looking at to move and our eyes have to track and/or reacquire
> what we were looking at. It's obviously possible, but on the micro-
> scale it's expensive when you have to do it 1000 times per day of
> coding. Horizontal scrolling is even worse because not only is it
> harder to track visually, but we don't have nearly the same ease of
> use on our mouse to horizontally scroll as we do to vertically
> scroll. Just reacquiring where you were in the code takes up a
> miniscule amount of time and brain power that could be used for
> better purposes. Again, it doesn't seem like much, and you may
> dismiss me as being melodramatic, but this discussion is a recurring
> one for a reason. It's enough of a problem to bug people and want it
> to be different.
>
> So to speak to Dan's point, trading vertical scrolling for horizontal
> scrolling would be a move in the wrong direction. But if you can
> reduce three lines to one WITHOUT causing horizontal scrolling, that
> benefits everyone, or at least everyone who uses a scroll wheel.
Scrolling is part of it, eye tracking is a less-obvious but more
significant issue; there is a reason newspaper columns are narrow — it
eases reading. Another part is burying semantics in a line, for
example, I find the common practice of `if err := f(); err != nil {...`
to be significantly less readable than the equivalent where the f call
is outside the if, and reject code in review with this unless it's
needed for scoping reasons. I sort of wish that this feature did not
exist, though — even though the exact same semantics are possible in
the language without it with the use of block scopes — I can see why it
exists.
In general I agree, with what you're saying though as a problem
statement. The problem is tuning the gofmt heuristics (if a single-line
if handling were adopted). This has been discussed in numerous issues
and rejected (for a variety of reasons), so it's unlikely to be
changed.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"golang-nuts" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/ecc70f6c0d3facd0f74763f95711ebb25c789e5f.camel%40kortschak.io.
