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0 pointsywei34105y ago0 comments

I teach adult learners; my own experience suggests that there are multiple issues.

First, is that in no other text form, does white-space change meaning such that the text becomes "unreadable" (sure your docs may be formatted a little weirdly, but hey someone can still read it). Simple python is close enough to prose that people get confused.

Second, is that they haven't learnt to grok compiler messages - the program either works or doesn't work. Coupled with number 1, it basically means they can't /see/ any issues or fix them.

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Kim_Bruning5y ago· 1 in thread

Interesting, are there other languages that they find easier to read and write?

And ... very interesting... what are the pain points when interacting with compiler/interpreter messages, in your experience? Are they introduced early on?

ywei3410OP5y ago

I haven't found one; and I hypothesize that if one were to exist it wouldn't be useful. Ironically, the GPT code generators are probably the closest - where the syntax is inexact and ambiguous.

I'm not entirely sure - but the terseness of the message and the out of the way location meant that the students... mostly ignored the errors. I think having a pedagogic IDE [1] which would /massive/ highlighting and really verbose errors may have helped; but that's entirely my speculation.

[1] Example of a pedagogic IDE which has arrows: https://i.stack.imgur.com/CwKQG.png

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