[racket-dev] stepper UI question

Right now, the stepper takes the code from the definition windows and
displays it in a different window, with a different color, with a
different layout, with some brackets turned into parenthesis, and with
the comments are removed. I just opened a simple solution from last
semester and launched the stepper on it.  It took me no less than 20
seconds to trace the first redex presented by the stepper to the
expression in the definition window it came from. It's really hard to
do!

When using the stepper, students struggle to see the correspondence
between what's on the left and what's on the right, despite the
colored highlights and all that.  In my experience, the correspondence
has to be carefully pointed out to them by the instructor.  Their
understanding of the correspondence between the content of the stepper
window and the code they wrote in the definition window must be
fainter still.

There has to be an easy way to establish these two correspondences:
from pre-step to post-step, and from the stepper window to the
definition window. None of the proposals posted to in this thread so
far address this.

I can think of many different ways to make the stepper<->definition
correspondence manifest.  As John said, I once suggested that the code
should be reduced in-place, in the definition window. Shriram doesn't
like that idea (but he has never bothered to say why.)

Another possibility is to use a two column layout. The left column
would show the normal definition window, and the right column would
show a single stepper state, aligning each reduced (or partially
reduced) expression with the expression it came from on the left-hand
side.

To establish the pre<->post correspondence, the redex should disappear
and its reduction be put in its place (with the rest of the code
sliding downward smoothly to make space if necessary.)


> It's not clear how you want to handle test cases; they don't
> currently generate anything in the interactions window, and yet this
> sounds like the thing that you're *most* likely to want to be able to
> step.

Yes.



> the result of "generate-report" (the hidden summary-generation call
> that check-expect inserts) should be a snip that shows up in the
> interactions window, called (e.g.) "Test Report".  Clicking on this
> (right-clicking on this?) should open a window showing the test cases
> in some tabular format, indicating which ones succeeded and which
> ones failed.  Selecting one of these, the user could choose to see
> its steps.

That's too many clicks. Every click the student has to do is a click
they may fail to do successfully. In my observations, most students
fail to click on the blue links that appear in the test result window.
Those who do click the link then fail to click back to the definition
window. Clicks are expensive; our interfaces should strive to minimize
them as much as possible.

See also:

Aza Raskin's presentation "Don't Make Me Click"
http://www.cheaprevolution.com/the_cheap_revolution/2008/10/dont-make-me-click.html

and Aza's blog post on how to critique an interface.
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/how-to-critique-an-interface/