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

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

#271

Post by lloeki »

vidarh wrote: post #35
water9 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO syntax coloring lessens the cognitive load. What is "high level code". You are telling a machine what to do and to do it as fast as possible. Can you still make money telling a machine what to do but not as fast, depends but most likely. We code to ultimately make money in one form or another. Whether you keep that money or put it towards altruistic causes is independent of the shared commonality.

I have to agree. Syntax highlighting lets me recognise patterns in code without having to read it, and I actively avoid reading details I don't need. (To me that is also what annoy me about IDE's - I want to focus on the shape of the code, not other stuff. When I focus on code, I want that code to be all that exists in my mind at that time; but I suspect whether or not you like IDE's is orthogonal to how you like you…

Interesting that you mention shapes, because for me that extends to keywords and stuff, e.g I don't care if def or class is highlighted, the shape of the code and the tokens tell me that, so it being coloured is redundant and thus useless cognitive load most of the time.

The main use I have of syntax highlighting is instead making sure the computer and I agree on these tokens being what I expect them to be; it's a form of live parsing error control, a direct feedback loop, not a way for me to parse code.

My ideal colour scheme is none at all, save for subduing comments (and being able to toggle that, subduing code instead) and colouring things in/around errors when a mismatch is detected (typically, unbalanced delimiters)

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

#272

Post by BirdieNZ »

vanderZwan wrote: post #55
giantg2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a fair amount like me. I'm autistic.

There are overlapping symptoms between the two. There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

> There is also comorbidity, if I'm not mistaken.

Last I checked, it's uni-directional; if you have autism, you are more likely than the general population to have ADHD, but not the other way around.

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

#273

Post by themoonisachees »

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…

Visual studio is such consistently the slowest program to open on my machine it's not even funny. I once tried to build an open source project which was tooled around VS and in the time it took to open, I successfully read the VS config in notepad and did the actions by hand.

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

#274

Post by scns »

ahshdiazzz662 wrote: post #158
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…

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 keywo…

IntelliJ recommends inlining single use functions.

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

#275

Post by sodapopcan »

ziml77 wrote: post #249
sodapopcan wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What constitutes an overly long name for you? Are you talking Java-y things likes `UserAccountBuilderFactoryFactory` or even just something like `operation` instead of `op`?

For the `operation` vs `op` example, it's highly contextual. If it's used in a narrow scope or if it's repeated many times (like I've seen in functions that copy fields of one structure to another), `op` is preferable. Otherwise I'm fine with `operation`. The Java naming is one cause of what I really have a problem with. Like that name on it's own isn't the worst because the key info is right at the start and I'm pro…

I think we're mostly in agreement here, thanks for sharing!

I actually always write full variable names, even in narrow scopes. This is mostly because I'm used to programming in dynamic languages and it makes renaming much easier. I've also become so accustom to it that it makes scanning incredibly fast. For example:

    Enum.map(operations, fn operation ->
      execute(operation)
    end)
I can pretty much just read the left-hand side of that if I'm scanning really quickly, ie, ignore everything after `fn`. I'm talking micro-optimizations here, but I have been tripped up before when someone did something like `optn`.

Elixir allows for a shorthand notation for anonymous functions like so:

    Enum.map(operations, &execute(&1))
Some people hate that but again I like it due to the refactoring advantages (it becomes very simple to read once you get used to it).

I hear you on the x/y thing. You example is actually why I really prefer snake case, though I don't want to start a flame war there, haha. But ideally when you're dealing with points and dimensions you wrap them in a type or object that you can pass around and the receivers can extract simple `x` and `y` variables from them.

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

#276

Post by pxc »

carlmr wrote: post #270
pxc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also find this splitting-out that happens with OOP extremely unhelpful. I'd never considered that problem being exacerbated by ADHD, but it makes perfect sense.

The opposite to this: sum types (enums with values). You have all the logic in one place, and if you forget to handle a case in most languages you're forced by the compiler to be explicit.

In my first job after college, we had codebases that took both approaches: an OPP-y Java codebase with lots of inheritance and some FP-oriented codebases that used Scala case classes. As a novice, I definitely found the case class handling easier to browse and understand at the time.

The OOP stuff can be made a little easier to work with if your editor can show a lot of buffers at once and makes it easy to search through buffers. Trying to just flip through all of those files with tabs would have been really hard for me.

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

#277

Post by patmorgan23 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #54
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…

> unmedicated, I cannot usually even read more than a few pages of a book before either losing focus or feeling drained Tangent: ADHD is strange. I have it too, and yet when it comes to reading my symptoms appear to be the exact opposite (when I was younger I could not stop reading books until I finished them, even if I ended up skipping an entire night of sleep for it). I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decades…

Recently I've heard ADHD described as "the inability (or weak ability) to direct attention" rather than a lack of it. So hyper fixation could be a symptom.

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

#278

Post by kazinator »

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…

> I lose tabs in about 15 seconds after opening them.

But even simple editors open multiple files somehow, in tabs or otherwise.

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

#279

Post by kazinator »

nwallin wrote: post #175
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…

> Visual studio proper is a 100% circus for me now. I can power through it, but I lose tabs in about 15 seconds after opening them. I used to be the same way but then I discovered Visual Studio's vertical tab option. Tabs are displayed vertically on the left side of the editor pane. The filenames are all aligned so it's actually possible to visually scan them. You can group them by project and color code them by file…

There are browser extensions to do that with browser tabs. I use Sideberry.

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

#280

Post by bjornasm »

naikrovek wrote: post #192
rpastuszak wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is for this reason that I try to write what I feel is very obvious or self-explanatory code [...] I don't have ADHD, but, for different reasons, my brain seems to work in a similar manner. And, I have developed coping strategies similar to those applied with people on the ADHD spectrum [1][2]. My anxiety around coding has reduced a significantly when I learned about TDD and started writing code made of very smal…

> My anxiety around coding has reduced a significantly when I learned about TDD and started writing code made of very small, composable chunks. you definitely do not have ADHD, then. I find these absolutely impossible to trace through when I want to find out what a program is actually doing, in reality . if I have to find the actual logic used in main or whatever event handler, and it's in a function called by a func…

>you definitely do not have ADHD, then. I find these absolutely impossible to trace through when I want to find out what a program is actually doing, in reality.

You cannot determine if people have adhd on whether they agree with you on big vs small functions. Its not how it works and all, and your preference is just a preference and not an universal truth for everyone with adhd.

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