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Progressive disclosure does absolutely nothing for your students looking up example code only to be greeted by alien syntax that does the same thing. Pretend y

• Razengan 7y ago
  You would look it up, as you would for anything else you see for the first time.
  • keenmaster 7y ago
    I wonder if there's a coding interface for beginners that works as follows: The beginner types a declaration of "I want to _____" and the interface uses ML to auto-suggest code. The auto-suggest would be context-sensitive and fit in with previously written code. Auto-correct would work similarly. If the declaration isn't specific enough, then the auto-suggest tool would ask a series of questions that illustrate the different choices a programmer can make in achieving their goal. Finally, the tool would output code that reflects the beginner's choices. This would increase the speed of the think-do feedback loop. Beginners would be able to jump into coding with very minimal education and "make" the application they want straight away. Of course, it would usually behoove them to eventually read some programming books and take classes, but this tool would pique their interest. The power of the auto-complete would scale back as the beginner progresses unless they get stuck. Maybe this would only work on a finite set of projects that the ML was trained on, which is fine because you can just give a lot of projects to choose from. That is until the ML becomes more powerful and generalizable.
  • hndc 7y ago
    Among the drawbacks of excessive syntactic sugar is that it is often difficult or impossible to look up
    • Razengan 7y ago
      Do you have examples of that?