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As a teacher, I am rather surprised that you would frown on trial and error exploration. My first program was written on punch cards, It took a shoe box full o
by uberman 5y ago
As a teacher, I am rather surprised that you would frown on trial and error exploration.
My first program was written on punch cards, It took a shoe box full of them to complete trivial assignments. I was thankful when I got to use my first line editor, my first page editor, my first general editor and my first IDE.
I don't believe anything would be gained by going back to carving programs out of stone tablets.
- anamexis 5y agoI've worked with several junior programmers who, when they encountered an error in a program they were working on, would immediately go back to their editor and try changing something to see if it fixed it. I encouraged them to stop, read the error and stack trace, and understand the issue before they changed anything to fix it. I think their skills improved for it. Trial and error is good, but you have to understand what you are trying, and if it works, why. Writing out a program up front can encourage this.
- saurik 5y agoYeah. I take this a step further, FWIW: I often look at something and think I know what is wrong, but I still force myself to prove it before allowing myself to try it, as the goal is to get better enough to not make the mistake in the future as well as be sure it works rather than merely looking correct for some "test".
- marcodiego 5y agoTrial and error to learn something new is one thing. Trial and error of random modifications to fix something without ever understanding what was wrong is another entirely different thing.
- Zababa 5y agoAs someone that learned programming with editors/IDE, it's nice once in a while to go back to more basic methods, think more about the code. This is useful when at work the edit/deploy/test cycle is ~5 minutes.