It has really bugged me that I have lost many games due to the inability to change the programming language outside of a game. You lose many seconds by switching the language in game, and often it leads to a defeat on quicker flashes. I think that it would be a great ability to change the currently selected programming language while in the preparation screen or in the main menu.
If this isn’t a good idea, I’d like to hear why.
Regards, Tuukka.
What do you want to change exactly? The default language (for CoC at least) should be the one you last submitted an answer with iirc, so you shouldn’t need to change it every time.
I concur. To switch the language to your liking inside IDE, you need to do mouse move - click - scroll - click. This may take several seconds. Some clashers submit their results in 15 seconds, so losing several seconds just to change the language is critical.
Currently, to change the “default” language of IDE to the one you prefer, you need to open a puzzle somewhere and change the language of IDE there - this is not intuitive and not comfortable.
It would be great to have some language switch outside the IDE as well and/or a list of favorite languages accessible through one-click buttons.
CoC is (used to?) be the context where I’d use a specific language for every problem. Previous used language mostly meaningless.
The thing is, changing it before seeing the problem statement wouldn’t help (me) either: what I’d really have welcomed are hotkeys for my major clash languages. Which, incidentally, are neither the languages I use the most for puzzles nor the languages that are blessed with that come-first-before-alphabetical-order-in-the-dropdown-list sheen.
A selector in the preparation screen would at least avoid starting in Java.
Mostly, for me, I change between Python3, Python2 and C#. Sometimes, when it’s useful, I’ll change the language to Python2 from Python3 to save a few bytes, and in the next game I lose time by switching back to Python3 and doing the challenge on that language. By going to the ‘puzzles’ section and changing the language in there is pretty low quality, in my opinion. Most of the time, when my game is finished, I hop onto a new lobby to play another game, so going to the puzzles section to change the language, might cause me to miss the upcoming game.