I agree with this vision, and think it’s possible to have hints while avoiding too much disruption. We’ve established there will be a way to persistently disable the feature per machine. At worst veterans who find the hints disruptive will only need to disable them once. @Eiji smartly pointed out that a hint could explain how they can be disabled.
@josevalim’s original example would have helped me when I was getting used to IEx.
Even though I happened to understand how char lists are encoded, it caught me off guard the first time I saw one of my lists printed as a char list in IEx. Having a quick hint in that moment would have helped me get on with my day and be less anxious about potential gremlins in my machine doing things I don’t understand. Granted, it didn’t take too long to work out what was going on and why, but a hint would’ve helped. And remember,
Unfortunately I’m struggling to think of many other hints I’d like to see, but I bet pairing with a complete beginner would expose them. There’s probably some related to pattern matching gotchas, as that’s a foreign concept to most who have little experience with the ML language family.
Some of concerns about hints seem to be that we could end up with too many hints that aren’t useful. Perhaps we should also discuss how to gather useful feedback from users about individual hints.
One idea that comes to mind is giving each hint a unique ID like Rust does for its errors. When the Rust compiler emits an error it includes the error’s ID so you can query for more information, like this:
$ rustc --explain E0001
This error suggests that the expression arm corresponding to ...
When users file issues about errors they generally include the error ID. This makes it easier to find discussions about the particular error, and even see how its explanation text has evolved over time in response to these concerns.
Another potential benefit of assigning hints public IDs is we could someday support another hint mode called ‘terse’ which emits a hint ID and a one-line title. When users are interested in seeing more they can use a special command to see full explanation associated with that ID.
