I've recently taught a programming class to mostly 5th and 6th graders using PICO-8. I was curious to see what Tiniest2D would have to offer.

For what I wanted to do, I do feel I sort of fought the engine. Well maybe not fight, but had to work-around non-existing features. Particles! Primitives!

As I got into it and wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to finishing, so I decided to use this as an exercise to see if I could embrace auto-complete paren/brackets. I'd really like to be a cool kid and see how it can save me time. Conclusion: for me at least, they are simply a flow breaking. They don't really save me any typing and make me fix removing unwanted parenthesis. I'm interested to hear why they are so great and useful such that editors like Jupyter also defaults them on!

• I don't finding them saving any typing. I guess it's supposed to help with balancing? Well, they don't balance right in all cases (as below), so just please give me (i) highlighted brackets so I can see which is matching and (ii) and shortcut to jump between highlighted and matching brackets.
• If I typo (, then I need to delete two things.
• If I typo a backspace/delete and kill an (, then after re-adding, I need to kill the ).
• If I'm adding paren for grouping in math or something, I need to delete the added ).
• If adding complexity to an expression - say take absolute value, I need to delete the added ) when I add abs(.

  I really like the PICO-8 shift enter, that when used after starting a function/for/etc (1) puts your cursor where it should go on next line (2) adds END where it should go, on following line with proper indentation. This is good because then I don't forget to add later, it is all line based, it is not forced.