Andrey (azangru) wrote,
Andrey
azangru
A talk about how beginner programmers struggle with error messages, which is mostly about empathy and so on, with concrete examples which annoy me. Instead of teaching those beginners some heuristics of searching for the causes of their bugs and drilling into them the techniques of using debuggers, the speaker is saying that error messages should be more beginner-friendly. Something like "x.push is not a function" is, according to her, too confusing. And her students, for whatever reason, don't go googling for error messages (like EADDRINUSE) to find out what they may possibly mean.



I mean, I am all for better errors and stuff, especially like the ones that Elm, and now Reason, and to some extent Flow, are boasting, but man, debugging is what developers do on daily basis, beginner or otherwise.
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