Hey guys,
Since I myself am beginner programmer and a student in high-school, i thought that my opinion might be beneficial to the racket community. So here goes:
I am basically going to list out the pros and cons how drracket actually places the code:
Pros:
1.----Color-coding (differenciating between the strings, chars, comments, functions, etc) (this is a very useful feature, for students who, like myself, are learning programming)
2.----The auto indent is also very good to a certain degree. (the only problem is taht
3.----The program contour is very useful for students who are used to visual representation of the code.
4.----Highlighting of the text enclosed within a set of parentheses. (extremely useful)
Con
1.----Because some of the code can get very long (unlike some other languages), it is important for students to be able to keep the code very neat, so I think it is vital that drracket never leaves brackets partially hanging when the width of the drracket-frame-width is reached. It can get very challenging to find a simple mistake.
2.----Optimization of font-color loading (for a lack of a better word). To give you a better idea during coding take this case into consideration: In 30 minutes of coding, I can take up to 10 minutes just waiting for the program to end the current compilation [my pc specs: i3, windows 7, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 500 GB hard drive]. So in a school environment, it would be inefficient for students to code within an alloted 45 minutes of class time.
Some Features that will be extremely useful for students (i can stress this enough)
1.----When you click on a defined function name, it is necessary that all the same phrases are highlighted throughout the whole file.
Here is an example:
(define (paint-engine s)
(draw-extras [lets say, i click this and the blinking cursor is between "a" and "w". then the throughout the whole file that whole phrase "draw-extras" is highlighted]
(draw-gun
(draw-health
(draw-helis-health
(draw-title......
Like I said, this is so vital for beginning programmers. It made it so much easier for me to find errors, in some cases cutting down the time taken to find errors from hours to minutes.
2.----One other feature that would be excellent is actually a popup list that comes up whenever typing the first word after every parentheses. Since this is usually a name of a function, it would be useful if drracket lists all functions that begin with the first letter typed after the parentheses. After the second letter is typed, the list narrows down the list to include the first two characters typed...and so on. For beginning programmers, I found it useful to use that feature since it easens what the students have to remember, while promoting a good programming syntax.
3.----Since drracket indents the a line after taking into consideration of the previous line and since it compiles one line after another, it maybe auto-indent the lines when you click run, so it keeps the code clean by itself (self-cleaning).
Hopefully this information actually pertains to what you all are talking about or can be useful.
And BY NO MEANS am I saying "drracket is not good", if that is what you have got out of this reply.
If you have any problem(s) deciphering my sometimes unclear statements, please don't hesitate to ask.
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