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The coding experience
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I've had this experience in other languages, but never python. Find the missing semicolon and getting a cryptic error message is a very common programming experience.
The reason I never had this problem in python is that by the time I learned it, I was already a fairly experienced developer, and I used better tooling from the get go. This kind of error is reallllllly hard to make in a modern IDE using a linter and formatter.
That suggests to me that this is more likely a fairly language agnostic experience. It might even bias people against the languages they learn first.
I mean, I guess, it depends on your perspective. Some folks work in garbage/proprietary languages all day and would be very glad to have Python-levels of compiler help. Others work in JS/TS and do have similar nonsense to deal with as in Python.
But lots of languages, e.g. JVM languages, Rust etc., don't struggle with semicolons and the like.
And they don't have to compile at runtime, so they can easily outclass Python for more complex error reporting, which is at least my experience.
Personally, I have pretty much only had the experience of "tell me where the error is" in Python and TS.
I'll always appreciate Lisp for the most powerful REPL in existence of programming languages by a long shot. Name me one programming language that empowers developers to troubleshoot and fix runtime errors with high availability like Lisp does:
The REPL in Lisp is so powerful that there's an entirely different approach to developing apps in Lisp. You can, and some do, code everything inside of the REPL. When they're done, they save the file to disk.