Script Editor Autocomplete Optional?

Thu Sep 14 13:18:43 EDT 2017

My response to this will consist of interleaved comments as the matter 
it addresses goes far further than
the "question" about auto-completion.

Oh, and Please check out the pictures, they are groovy!

Richmond.

On 9/14/17 6:29 pm, ** Clarence P Martin ** via use-livecode wrote:
> I am impressed with the Auto Complete. This was something that several people made a point of, saying that LiveCode was incomplete without.

> I believe that it is like everything else in life, People are resistant to change and once it happens we will get used to it.

This is NOT change as in sea-change, it is a way of helping people who 
feel they need help with scripting.

I am quite sure I could get used to auto-completion in the same way as 
I've got "used to" the suggestions that crop up in the
Message Box: doesn't stop me cursing them and disliking them intensely.

The reason why many long-term users of LiveCode/Revolution/Metacard 
stuck to the Metacard front-end/GUI was they DIDN'T want
to work in a Nanny-State environment: if the recent additions of listing 
possible handlers were not turnable-offable, and the auto-complete
feature is not made that way as well, then LiveCode will "turn off" the 
folk who prefer to do things that way.

This is why my wife has stopped telling me when to change my shirt; 
because it intensely annoyed me and I am perfectly capable of
working that out for myself; and, unlike many wives/husbands/partners I 
have heard about, loves me enough to respect my judgement.

I am well aware we live in a world of increasing dumbing down, and to a 
certain extent I see auto-completion as part of that:

I first encountered this when at the "University" of Abertay, where a 
certain Mrs Lobster (name changed from that of another crustacean
to make her even more ridiculous than she was already) was supposed to 
be teaching Masters degree students Visual BASIC (there
was no explanation of the rationale behind that), and told me my code 
was no good because it did not adhere to the guidelines in
a very stupid book on VB that had been chosen as the course book (I 
didn't buy it as at £65 and a quick flick through it in the bookshop
I thought I'd rather go and splurge that money on a rather groovy LEGO 
set for me kids). When I pointed out that the code did what it was meant to
(i.e. it got the computer to crunch the numbers and spit the required 
answers out at the end) she said that was "beside the point" as
my code was "non-canonical": where this extremely limited person had 
picked up such a poncy term as "non-canonical" one can only
wonder!

People are resistant to change; but there are 3 types of change:

1. Change that brings with it improvements and benefits.

2. Change for change's sake.

3. Change that is 100% unnecessary but driven by other, hidden, 
considerations.

Now auto-completion DOES fall into category #1 for a certain proportion 
of users.

HOWEVER, I showed LC 8.2 to "Little Maxim" today (an 11 year old, 
"squeaky little devil" who did programming with me in the Summer),
and he said, "Oh, that just gets in the way of what I want to do."

Little Maxim, and a whole slew of other kids learnt BBC BASIC with me 
this Summer on BBC computers . . .

This enabled them to learn many of the fundamental bits and concepts of 
programming: on computers made between 1984 and 1988.

I bought a whole bunch of BBC computers from eBay at £10-30 each, and 
rigged up to old cathode-ray TVs (which are FREE all over the place)
served in exactly the way required.

Little Maxim and chums (wow, there's a supposedly outdated word that 
means exactly what I want here) then "graduated" to Livecode, reproducing
all the stuff they had done with BBC BASIC without a backward glance.

> I agree that there should be some way to turn it off for those that don't want to use it.
> My feeling is that any optional features are better than none.

Of course they are, as long as "optional" is not lost sight of.

Try saying "Optional" to Tim Cook . . .

I have a teapot that is made of enamelled cast-iron,

https://cdn-img-3.wanelo.com/p/337/091/637/a35848ef24f15a5b1fe9948/x354-q80.jpg

that I bought in Robertson's Shop in Union street in St. Margaret's 
Hope, South Ronaldsay,
Orkney

https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3079/2903156048_b8fffeb4c2_b.jpg

in 1985 . . . it has travelled around the world with me, and I have used 
it to:

1. Make tea.

2. Make coffee.

3. Brew Hibiscus.

4. Water plants.

5. Clean out my children's potties when they were babies.

6. Cook soup.

Now if Mrs Robertson had given me a long list of DOs & DON'T with the 
teapot I would have told her to "boil her head".

If Mrs Robertson had fitted the teapot with a detector which would have 
stopped it working whenever I attempted to use it
for anything other than making tea I would have walked across the road 
to Doull's and sought out a teapot there:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3191/2903157598_8df0c28908_b.jpg

> Ricky Nelson's song Garden Party (for those who remember) said it best "you can't please everyone, but you've got to please yourself".
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Clarence Martin
> Email: chipsm at themartinz.com
> Cell: 626 6965561
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: use-livecode [mailto:use-livecode-bounces at lists.runrev.com] On Behalf Of Bob Sneidar via use-livecode
> Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2017 7:49 AM
> To: How to use LiveCode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com>
> Cc: Bob Sneidar <bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com>
> Subject: Re: Script Editor Autocomplete Optional?
>
> Well regardless of what anyone else says I love the auto-complete feature of GLX2, so I'm all for it so long as it doesn't as some have said make you work harder to uncorrect things, but that is just a matter of ironing things out, much like we all do daily with our own code.
>
> Bob S
>
>
>> On Sep 13, 2017, at 23:12 , Monte Goulding via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>
>> While it’s all a little disheartening that some people’s first response to your work is please turn it off I have a PR that lets you do that here:
>>
>> https://github.com/livecode/livecode-ide/pull/1739<https://github.com/
>> livecode/livecode-ide/pull/1739>
>>
>>> On 14 Sep 2017, at 4:10 pm, Richmond Mathewson via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Personally I don't want Script Editor Autocomplete at all: I'd rather
>>> stand or fall by my own light, so the ability to turn this off is a
>>> MUST as far as I am concerned.
>>>
>>> Richmond.
>>>
>>> On 9/13/17 11:41 pm, J. Landman Gay via use-livecode wrote:
>>>> On 9/13/17 1:34 PM, Rick Harrison via use-livecode wrote:
>>>>> Hi there,
>>>>>
>>>>> I was wondering, if I find I don’t like the new Script Editor
>>>>> Autocomplete function because I find it too distracting, can I turn
>>>>> it off?  I think the ability to turn it off might be important to
>>>>> some people.
>>>> I'd like an option like that too, I'm a minimalist.
>>>>
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