Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 3:21 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote: >> Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: >> >>> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 2:51 AM, Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> wrote: >>>> Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: >>>> <snip> >>>>> ... I teach JavaScript as well as Python, and I've seen some >>>>> pretty horrendous indentation flaws (examples available if people ask >>>>> privately, but I will anonymize them because I'm not here to shame >>>>> students) - but there have been nearly as many cases where the >>>>> indentation's fine and the bracket nesting isn't. >>>> >>>> Can I ask what editor(s) your students have available? I ask because >>>> I've not given a moment's thought to indentation or what bracket matches >>>> what for decades due to having a helpful editor. >>>> >>> >>> Quite a few, depending on which platform they're using. I'd say >>> Sublime is the most common choice. >> >> So what's going in your opinion? The errors are in the group who don't >> use the right tools or what? > > In my opinion, what's going on is that exploring code is a messy > process, and that the more little finicky things you have to get > right, the more likely you'll get something wrong. Which one you get > wrong is pretty much arbitrary.
Do you think the tools (the editor in particular) could be more helpful? As I said elsewhere I've forgotten how these sorts of errors happen so I have very little insight into how to prevent them. With token-marked blocks I feel (though I don't know) that matching and auto-indenting help me to know I've written what I intended to write. I was just surprised that these errors happened enough for you to comment on them. > Getting indentation wrong in JS won't affect the interpreter, but it > majorly affects the human. Which one would you rather confuse? I'm guessing that's a rhetorical question! (It obviously depends on the situation.) I suspect that part of the reason these errors occur is precisely because they don't matter to the interpreter and students are doing a lot of self-easement based on "does it work?" tests. This is why Python is a win in such situations -- you can't write confusingly indented code, only wrong code. -- Ben. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
