Re:Learning to Program Is Getting Harder
by Sohcahtoa82 on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @04:28PM
(#22620911)
I keep kicking around the idea of creating a website that teaches Python that starts with guiding you through the installation of PyCharm and the Python interpreter, and really teaches how to properly use the debugger.
Things like recursion, something a lot of new people struggle with, is about a million times simpler to understand if you step through the code in a debugger and can visually see the call stack and local variables.
It honestly kind of blew my mind that I went though college and got a degree and never once was taught how to use breakpoints and the Step In/Step Over/Run to Cursor/etc buttons that every GUI debugger offers. I figured them out on my own, but I recently had a co-worker who insisted on only using vim to write some Python and he had a bug that he just couldn't squash. I was looking over his shoulder and couldn't figure it out either. But once I got a copy of his code and set a breakpoint in PyCharm and saw exactly what was happening, I had it fixed in minutes.
Things like recursion, something a lot of new people struggle with, is about a million times simpler to understand if you step through the code in a debugger and can visually see the call stack and local variables.
It honestly kind of blew my mind that I went though college and got a degree and never once was taught how to use breakpoints and the Step In/Step Over/Run to Cursor/etc buttons that every GUI debugger offers. I figured them out on my own, but I recently had a co-worker who insisted on only using vim to write some Python and he had a bug that he just couldn't squash. I was looking over his shoulder and couldn't figure it out either. But once I got a copy of his code and set a breakpoint in PyCharm and saw exactly what was happening, I had it fixed in minutes.