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Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a freak but almost all of the proposed "improvements" in this article I find distracting, annoying, and would turn me off of ever using the feature. I do NOT want my notes or content dancing around on the screen or having motion displayed because its evaluating equations or statements while I'm writing them. It's also why I disable most autocomplete and warnings in code editors. I don't complaints about syntax errors for lines I haven't finished writing.

Like, why would I care about the value of `a` before I've finished writing the equation? Sometimes a tool just shutting the hell up is a good thing.

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What makes me crazy about my developer setup in vscode right now is that it is complaining about unused imports (even auto removing them before I turned that off) when writing an import statement. However if I try to avoid that by referencing that module before import it is (naturally) complaining about unknown module referenced.

I was really shocked at vscodes default behavior of adding import statements to my code without asking and have strayed away from any kind of automation since

VS Code does not just add imports to your code. I switched away from VSC when I found out the official Python extension (which you basically have to use to get things done) automatically installs things like Python 3 typings—ordinary modules, completely unvetted (e.g., typings for Django are maintained by a random guy who last time I used it had nothing to do with Django core team) and installed from PyPI (which totally did not have an avalanche of packages with embedded malware just recently)—and has no option to disable this.

Is there somewhere I can read more about this?

PyCharm does that too, which can be very confusing.

> I don’t complaints about syntax error for lines I haven’t finished writing

How about “complaints about” syntax errors after you’ve finished writing?

Jokes aside, to answer why knowing the value of ‘a’ might be useful before writing the full equation: ever work in excel and you’re building up a calculation, and when finished, your answer isn’t what you expected? Tracing that missing parentheses or brain-fart typo can be frustrating. I imagine that’s the same reason why some people would care about the value of ‘a’ before they’ve finished.

Fair point. Interactivity is a spectrum that should match the user preference. Interactivity helps when you are learning the tool, because you can do & fix mistakes faster. But when you want to think deeply, it should stand away and be there only when you explicitly request it.

Yeah it’s almost like people design things without asking you specifically for feedback.

Lots of people like autocomplete and animations.

My bad for attempting to start a discussion on a discussion thread.

I hope you’re not this miserable and rude in real life.

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