BigglesB

It may seem silly, but I try to use different IDEs, editors or at least different colour schemes for different languages. Currently that generally means XCode for C++, VSCode for javascript (current main two) & Sublime Text for everything else. Helps me mentally context switch just that little bit quicker, though luckily the syntax isn’t all that “close” as you put it.

Don’t want to “diagnose at a distance”, but it’s difficult to read this and not see a lot of the guy’s quirks as being quite typical of someone incredibly smart who also has ADHD.

Also don’t want to diminish his quite remarkable achievements in any way, either!

As someone with ADHD who has done what I consider to be quite a lot of creative work, the equation seems to be the exact opposite for me. Execution is dull and predictable, plus my brain just doesn’t care about the good/bad consequences unless they are both significant and imminent. On the other hand, during exploration I’m like a firecracker on speed and can lose hours going down rabbit holes experimenting and chasing different ideas. My brain is very happy in this state with a constant flow of dopamine but before my diagnosis, I struggled to ever finish anything of significance. For the past couple of years since though (and with the help of medication which ironically is a kind of “slow release amphetamine” as far as I understand, so quietens my brain’s constant desire for stimulation), I’ve finally been able to see a whole serious of large tasks through to completion over the course of a much longer project than I’ve ever really been able to do before. So I guess what the author describes may well be the root of why people sometimes refer to ADHD being a “superpower” if neurotypicals tend to struggle so much with the bits that come naturally to us…

I do a fair bit of UE4 coding in both Blueprint & C++. Each has benefits and drawbacks, many of which have been mentioned already.

The biggest unmentioned one from a learning perspective though, is that with node-based editors, while you can still make logic errors, it’s difficult to actually make syntax errors. When you get used to it, you might not mind forgetting occasionally to match brackets, remember semicolons, use the right keywords in the right places etc, but as a beginner, all of these things can be quite frustrating and opaque, with often cryptic error messages.

With visual node-graphs though, many of these things are just non-issues, which I think helps beginners gain confidence way faster without bouncing off and giving up in frustration. You can’t even connect pins of the wrong type most of the time, so you get some pretty well communicated type safety to boot.

I’d actually love to see an evolution of a fairly advanced visual programming tool like Blueprint turn into a more general-use language, although preferably with files that are still stored as plain text (so at least play nicely with git etc) rather than the binary black boxes that are currently chewing up my LFS...