Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

link.springer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 288 posts

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#151

Post by dagmx »

formulathree wrote: post #144
sneed_chucker wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great if you're in a codebase at a workplace which enforces python type annotation checking. Unfortunately, I can tell you from experience that out in the real world, at fortune 500 companies, there are millions of lines of untyped Python doing critical work while being full of subtle type errors which should be compile time errors but will rear their heads as runtime errors when it's least expected.

It's changed a lot recently. I would say the majority of companies now use type checking. It's def not as pervasive yet as Typescript.

Do you work at the majority of companies? I can tell you that I’ve worked with code bases from each of the FAANG companies that don’t use type checking, because it’s optional. Anything that’s optional in a language will not be ubiquitous

Your statements are incongruent with the reality of production.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#152

Post by jtr1 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #58
dakom wrote: post #30

When a problem has my attention, nothing can phase me. I get hyperfocused. Music, colors, the need to eat or sleep.. doesn't matter. All that gets put aside, the thing that has my attention has my full and undivided attention When something doesn't grab me, it takes enormous effort to maintain focus. It's not that other distractions are just so incredibly moving that they take my focus away. Rather, it's that it's ph…

> Rather, it's that it's physically difficult if not painful to focus on the thing that evades my attention, so by comparison, anything else is better. If I had to describe the feeling it's the mental equivalent of trying to push the same poles of two strong magnets together, while the distractions are like trying to avoid the north-south poles from attracting to each other. Especially the part where as soon as you s…

Wow, that is a perfect metaphor for what I feel

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#153

Post by VectorLock »

Every few years I go through the exercise of thinking "Oh has some cool features, maybe I'll try using it" and that ends quickly when I get annoyed by the clutter and lack of efficiency in operations and go back to vim-- even IDEs that have "vim mode." Even adding IDE like features to vim I quickly dump because I feel like they get in my way.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#154

Post by seabass-labrax »

sodapopcan wrote: post #135
dkh wrote: post #16

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…

> why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible) This is the paradox of "readable" code. Each person has a different definition of it. I also prefer to write as dumb code as possible (well, these days I do, I of course tried to be extra clever in my earlier days). But for me it's the jumping around that makes me lose focus…

> As a side note, I despise things like imports and aliases. I'd prefer that when I do jump to a function, I can read it without having to check if anything is imported or not.

One idea might be to use an LSP (Language Server Protocol) interface. It could describe the fully qualified symbol for you when you, say, select the abbreviated symbol or press a keyboard shortcut. I've been working on a moderately large C program with Emacs and clangd[1] recently and have been amazed at how 'immersive' it feels, and that's from someone who's used to the comfort of a Lisp REPL!

[1]: https://clangd.llvm.org/

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#155

Post by ziml77 »

bob1029 wrote: post #122

Even "lite" editors like VSCode, NP++, Sublime Text, etc have become distracting for me. Every time I fire one of these things up, my mental state is eliminated by being forced to dismiss some "hey we got a new version for you :D:D:D" bullshit modal. To whomever is responsible for adding these to apps: please stop. No one is enjoying your shenanigans. It is a text editor . Empathize with the user: People with far les…

Sublime Text is surprisingly bad about that. Or at least the package manager is. I'm okay with occasionally being prompted to update the editor, but it drives me crazy when I launch Sublime Text, go to start working in a text buffer, and then suddenly have the tab swap out from under me to show me changelogs for everything it just updated. All doing that does is piss me off and make me certainly not read the changelog because I'm instantly closing it to get back to what I was doing!

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#157

Post by ziml77 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #135
dkh wrote: post #16

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…

> why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible) This is the paradox of "readable" code. Each person has a different definition of it. I also prefer to write as dumb code as possible (well, these days I do, I of course tried to be extra clever in my earlier days). But for me it's the jumping around that makes me lose focus…

For me it's not just the jumps but also overly long names. My ability to quickly scan the code is hindered by names that all jumble together because they aren't visually distinct enough. And when they read like a book, I'm going to have the same problems I have when reading books where I'm somehow reading all these words across the page but at the same time not actually processing any of it.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#158

Post by ahshdiazzz662 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #135
dkh wrote: post #16

As an engineer for 10+ years with pretty severe ADHD (unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained) I have always been aware of how much my performance fluctuates based on the cognitive load of dealing with the code I am currently working with, and how it is displayed. I half-jokingly tend to describe it to people as having a "small brain buffer…

> why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible) This is the paradox of "readable" code. Each person has a different definition of it. I also prefer to write as dumb code as possible (well, these days I do, I of course tried to be extra clever in my earlier days). But for me it's the jumping around that makes me lose focus…

I cannot stand programs that are excessively split up and have too many files. There is nothing worse, especially combined with tiny functions.

Not to mention the performance impact caused depending on the language. At this point I do not even care if it's true or not that the impact isnt negligible, if you are submitting something like that for me to review I'm probably going to demand you inline (not with the keyword, with copy paste) the majority of your functions and merge the files.

I think they are teaching this tiny function and tiny file method of programming in schools now or something. I get tons of submissions where there isn't a single function longer than 4 or 5 lines. I'm going to blame it on Java and OOP because thats when I started seeing it, probably due to people writing classes like that with trivial getters and setters rather than public fields.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#159

Post by formulathree »

dagmx wrote: post #151
formulathree wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's changed a lot recently. I would say the majority of companies now use type checking. It's def not as pervasive yet as Typescript.

Do you work at the majority of companies? I can tell you that I’ve worked with code bases from each of the FAANG companies that don’t use type checking, because it’s optional. Anything that’s optional in a language will not be ubiquitous Your statements are incongruent with the reality of production.

I've likely worked for more companies then you in the last 5 years or so due to my personality. I don't stay at one place for long. Actually I've probably worked for more in my entire career, but only the last 5 years should be relevant.

Even so where I worked is only part of the equation. You can look up which companies use python types in a google search.

Let me add more nuance, companies that use python as glue code as in scripting languages don't use types. This makes sense as python is considered not as important as the main language.

For companies that are primarily based on python... the majority use types. The ones that don't are actively migrating. This includes faang and subsidiaries. In fact type checkers for python are likely to be built by faang or companies close to that tier.

Re: Effect of perceptual load on performance within IDE in people with ADHD symptoms

#160

Post by sodapopcan »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #154
sodapopcan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why I try to keep functions/modules as simple as possible and ideally not longer in length than I can see on my screen at once (when possible) This is the paradox of "readable" code. Each person has a different definition of it. I also prefer to write as dumb code as possible (well, these days I do, I of course tried to be extra clever in my earlier days). But for me it's the jumping around that makes me lose focus…

> As a side note, I despise things like imports and aliases. I'd prefer that when I do jump to a function, I can read it without having to check if anything is imported or not. One idea might be to use an LSP (Language Server Protocol) interface. It could describe the fully qualified symbol for you when you, say, select the abbreviated symbol or press a keyboard shortcut. I've been working on a moderately large C pro…

I work in Elixir and there are LSPs available. I'd still rather be able to just read and take as little action as possible to have to figure out where something is coming from. But as a sibling commenter says, they hate long names, so it's impossible to please everyone and comes down to teams making agreements.
Post reply on HN