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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 t
by ywei3410 6y ago
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.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoInteresting, 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?
- ywei3410 6y agoI 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 https://i.stack.imgur.com/CwKQG.png