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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

#91

Post by VikingCoder »

I heard about a study:

Give a stack of CT images to a radiologist with zero user interface at all (just the original CT images shown), and ask them to do a read. They cine through the stack a couple times, and do their dictation. Have them do a few dozen cases.

Give the same stack of CT images to another radiologist in an unfamiliar user interface, with buttons and menus all over the place, and ask them to do a read. Tell them to ignore the UI, they should just cine and dictate. Have them do a few dozen cases.

The ones with the distracting buttons were indeed distracted by them. They were slower and less accurate in their read.

Terrifying, honestly.

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

#92

Post by sneed_chucker »

formulathree wrote: post #87
dagmx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It really does matter if you have any afflictions that exacerbate it. It maybe doesn’t matter for relative performance versus other developers but it does matter for the individual. Having frequent context switches just to keep on top of your work can be really draining. How much it matters also really depends on the languages you’re working in. Taking a couple languages I use regularly for example: Pytho…

Modern python is no longer dynamic. Type checking is a big part of python now. Python also has ADTs which match it in power to rust.

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.

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

#93

Post by dagmx »

formulathree wrote: post #87
dagmx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It really does matter if you have any afflictions that exacerbate it. It maybe doesn’t matter for relative performance versus other developers but it does matter for the individual. Having frequent context switches just to keep on top of your work can be really draining. How much it matters also really depends on the languages you’re working in. Taking a couple languages I use regularly for example: Pytho…

Modern python is no longer dynamic. Type checking is a big part of python now. Python also has ADTs which match it in power to rust.

Type hinting , not assertion, is a part of Python.

Type checking is analysis post facto and doesn’t account for dynamicism of classes.

The very ability to self modify an instance at any time or use __getattr__ makes it incredibly dynamic.

It also doesn’t account for every dependency having accurate type hints or any at all.

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

#94

Post by zer8k »

bloopernova wrote: post #34

I have ADD and I'm struggling to write a more complex Python app right now. I'm hating myself for not being able to easily skip around the code as it gets more complex with more classes and methods. So this is very apropos for me. Thing is, I can skip around Terraform much more easily (in my normal DevOps role). I'm wondering if Python whitespace isn't "right" for me somehow. EDIT: I'm definitely more used to Terrafo…

I am a professional Python developer. Having a good LSP is critical but it doesn't fix Python's biggest problem - the space scoping. It never gets easier you just eventually "get used to it". Keeping methods to a size that can fit on screen helps a lot but on larger projects this can be a lot to ask for. An LSP + a way to mark code is usually how I like to do things.

Your criticisms are valid. Python is the flavor-du-jour and often shoehorned into places it doesn't work well. One of those places is scaling with lines of code. It just simply begins falling apart as a nice experience once projects reach 10,000-20,000 lines. The space scoping becomes much harder to deal with and cognitive load increases in a hockey stick way after a critical line count. Just wait until you try to remedy some other problems with MyPy only to realize is just a stronger linter and not an actual type system :).

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

#95

Post by NortySpock »

scotty79 wrote: post #42

> participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging) Am I the only one that finds debugging not monotonous at all? Often the programming feels more monotonous. I'm not sure if that's because I feel like I'm learning something when I'm debuggging or that a bug is a puzzle to solve, I feel like a detective and a scientist figuring out things about my small part of the univers…

Maybe it's "stupid parser error debugging", where a single missing comma in a csv, or a missing semi-colon in a long one-line shell script, causes a bizarre, misleading error message.

Something where your tools mislead you because the input broke all the assumptions that were made.

In my experience I then have to resort some quick slice-and-dice work in a text editor to bisect the problem, and I'll eventually find it, but it is tedious and not fun. And your reward is usually learning "the input was wrong", not "the code is wrong".

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

#96

Post by captainbland »

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…

I'm part way into a massive stack of monotonous corporate e-learning modules and this is hitting me hard.

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

#97

Post by giraffe_lady »

katabasis wrote: post #88
giraffe_lady wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not adhd specific but https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06030 After reading this I implemented a code theme based primarily around typographic variation like weight rather than color. It uses only two colors (black and deep purple) in two weights and one italic each. I have pretty severe adhd and it's hard to judge but after using it for a few months I think this is better for me. Previously I had been using solarized…

I also immediately thought of Nano Emacs when I saw this article. There is a short talk (6min) from EmacsConf 2021 where the creator of Nano Emacs talks about his reasons for designing a simpler interface, I found it really interesting: https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/design/

Yeah it was kind of a mind blower to me. I'm not in a big hurry to settle an opinion but I have a feeling these are ideas that I'll be exploring and influenced by for the rest of my career.

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

#98

Post by eyelidlessness »

flir wrote: post #61
vanderZwan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Already has to a degree - hyperactive type and inattentive type. But you've also got to consider personal taste - hyperfixation happens when it's something you're interested in. Someone else might hyperfocus on video games, or trawling ebay, or researching a topic.

Not a disagreement, more of a yes, and: “interested” may not necessarily be personal interest, and the subject of hyperfocus might not be a personal interest. It can also happen manifest, for example, as obsession with solving some work problem or chore which isn’t appealing at all until begun. Or even some unrelated yak shaving tangent that fits none of these categories.

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

#99

Post by AndrewKemendo »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #80
VHRanger wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ADHD is a quantitative disorder, not qualitative. To some extent, everyone gets mild versions of ADHD symptoms, especially if tired/bad nutrition/no exercise, etc. ADHD is when these symptoms harm quality of life significantly across many domains and since you were prepubescent (it's a brain malformation, not a series of bad habits)

To expand on that, I think it can be clarified somewhat by describing the mechanism at work. People without ADHD have a generally-working motivation/reward system which is undergirded partially by dopamine. This neurotransmitter is relatively low in ADHD brains, which seems to lead to signal:noise issues. That’s likely a cause of having a highly distractible baseline state, but also leads to bursts of dopamine seemin…

Thank you for this very straightforward and concise explanation

I'm almost 40 and just realizing that I probably have some version of ADHD and your description of the Dopamine roller-coaster fits perfectly with my experience, both good and bad.

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

#100

Post by formulathree »

dagmx wrote: post #93
formulathree wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern python is no longer dynamic. Type checking is a big part of python now. Python also has ADTs which match it in power to rust.

Type hinting , not assertion, is a part of Python. Type checking is analysis post facto and doesn’t account for dynamicism of classes. The very ability to self modify an instance at any time or use __getattr__ makes it incredibly dynamic. It also doesn’t account for every dependency having accurate type hints or any at all.

modern python development is used in conjunction with an external type checker. That's what I meant.

My mistake for not being clear. Obviously the python interpreter itself does not do any type checks.

It's sort if like how modern development with javascript is used with an external compiler of another language (typescript) that compiles a typed language into one without types.

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