#i had my own weird errors at first like when i accidentally duplicated my file and edited the wrong one | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

quihi · 4 months ago

Text

One of the best times I had TAing in college took place the first week or two of a freshman programming class. A student needed help; it was my turn to go.

"What's up?"

"I got an error."

(Now, some of the error messages, you basically have to be told what they mean the first time, because there's a wall of text that doesn't get to the point or it's a topic that wasn't directly taught. But some are self-explanatory.)

"Did you read the error?"

"Yeah."

"Read it again. Out loud."

The student gave a huff, and started reading: "Expected semicolon on line 157… oh."

He scrolled to line 157, and swapped the commas for semicolons. The code compiled.

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

#it was such an easy help request and like to be clear i wasn't mad about this at all #i was absolutely delighted that he was able to fix his own error #everyone gets to ask for help with basics at the beginning of the semester #part of early programming classes is learning to read the errors and debug your code!#i felt like part of my job teaching was to help students fix their own errors not just tell them what to do #i had my own weird errors at first like when i accidentally duplicated my file and edited the wrong one #another time a student had the same error and read the whole thing and still seemed confused and i walked her through it #hope she figured out debugging at some point though #also #the wall of text error is missing include <vector>#the error that requires a quick explanation is variable out of scope #tech

83K notes · View notes