Re: Want To Learn Programming
Okay. Well, I'm going to assume you're using Visual Studio 2008 with jaws. Debugging does not work with NVDA. Debugging never has. After I managed to fight multiple inaccessible parts of submitting a bug report and including specifically what isn't working and how they can fix it, Microsoft's response was "we know, we can't get it into the next release", but it's been a problem for as far back as I went. If youa re only stepping by line, you can. But doing simple things like looking at variable values requires workarounds at best. 2010 and 2012 broke very basic things, though 2013 fixed some of them. Autocomplete has never worked well, if at all. Alt-tabbing doesn't work as soon as you use one of the high contrast color schemes (no, I don't know why, and if you had asked me I'd have said it was impossible to break it in this way). Formatting information is not availab
le. Autocomplete might work, but by the time I'm done dealing with all the other problems I've honestly stopped caring, and autocomplete isn't a big deal anyway. The only IDE that rates as fully accessible is Eclipse, and even there NVDA requires at least one workaround.
For C++, I use CMake for building and cdb for debugging, though I will admit that cdb is somewhat cryptic until you learn it some. Most languages have command line debuggers, with c# being a rare exception. That said, cdb may work on it-I've not had occasion to try.
The way you manage resources in a sane world is to stick them in the directory structure. You don't need Visual Studio to do this for you. If you are using one of the custom formats like xnb, you should know that that's an incredibly awful thing. And if you aren't, then VS is literally just copying a file on your behalf, and you can do it in even less time in Win
dows explorer by typing paths in the address bar. All of my projects have a little snippet of code that knows how to find the sounds directory and give me a sound object in whatever audio system I'm using, and I add new resources simply by putting the new file in that directory. The idea of the project as separate from the directory is completely false.
In terms of building C#, there's basically 0 compile time-you can get away without incremental building for a project the size of an audiogame. Failing that, you can use nmake or gnu make on them just fine. The only times you need MSBuild is if your project needs WPF or is targeting WinRT. 99% of games don't need either of these.
You've tied yourself to VS. Judging by other posts, you are a new programmer. This is therefore not surprising. Unfortunately, as a blind person, that's not optimal. It may be about the same if you take the time to memor
ize keystrokes to get around accessibility issues, but the whole point of an IDE is that you can glance at things. And we can't. I think that in the sighted world IDEs serve three purposes: GUI designers, crutches for new programmers, and a system for quickly presenting information to a user who can move their attention at literally a thought. GUI designers don't apply. Crutch kind of does because you can avoid the command line for a little while longer. Our method of moving our attention is to use multiple keystrokes and basically completely switch from what we're doing to something else, presuming that the part of the IDE we want is accessible in the first place. I have toyed with the idea of making an IDE or at least a text editor aimed at the blind, but this just isn't worth the effort; if I did, I think I could do some nice things that would actually bring some of the benefit to us, but it'd almost certainly need to b
e self voicing.
Unless you're partially sighted, GUI design isn't something you will be able to do effectively. That said, those lists are just method calls, and if you actually learn them instead of using the editors you can go faster. Navigating huge lists of hundreds of items is not a fast way to write anything. Wx does not give you an editor like that, but you can still make the method calls. There's also an abstraction aimed at the blind called gui_builder, but it's undocumented and a new Python programmer isn't going to be able to figure it out without docs. That aside, though, at least half of audiogames don't use GUI components, and most games in general need a completely different structure than a GUI provides anyway.
I'm assuming you're somewhat new to programming as we had the Screen Reader API thread. As you learn to program more, your ability to memorize things and not need the f
eatures you're leaning on will go away. I think the dependence will go away even faster if you choose to explicitly work on it. Most libraries and components are well written so that you can guess the name of something, or at least so that once you know the name it's kind of obvious why it is called what it is. I don't know what common code snippets are. The only thing I can think of is a for loop header. Everything else needs customization, and by the time you're done customizing you should probably have just typed it to start with. If you realy need project templates, set up a project somewhere and copy its directory.
As for who uses command line tools in the sighted community, basically anyone who is not either a Microsoft or Apple shop. Parts of Android development require it. Node.js, Python and Ruby all provide everything except autocomplete at the terminal. This includes getting packages installed
and line-by-line debugging. Linux and OS X make system libraries a first class citizen, and installing them is one command at a terminal in both of those as well. Go, Rust, Nim, Haskell and D do not have fully featured IDEs to my knowledge. Of those, D is the only language I can think of an IDE for at all. LLVM is one of the biggest and most important C/C++ projects and takes something like an hour to fully build. It does not use an IDE, probably because it outgrew all of them. Pypy is a very cool project that overturned huge parts of CS by successfully going against a bunch of things that people would have argued were basically facts. Again, no IDE. Firefox. Linux. Probably windows, judging from what people who have worked at Microsoft have told me. Anything C/C++ that's supposed to run on Android. Software for half the microcontrollers and embedded processors on the market. Most Linux software.
; I rest my case, and I haven't even talked about how you get big multidisciplinary teams where standardizing on an IDE can't be done because everyone knows something completely, completely different from everyone else.
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