Fixing the Pain of Programming

An anonymous reader writes "Light Table is a Kickstarted, open source IDE that's been trying to integrate real-time feedback into code creation. Part of their process has been figuring out how to improve the practice of programming, from top to bottom. They've put up a post about the troublesome aspects of programming that we've learned to deal with and take for granted, but which need solving if programming is to be made accessible for more people. 'Surprisingly, one of the most common difficulties we have heard from beginners is just running code. Even if we were to hand [a new programmer the whole source code] they would likely still struggle to actually use it. They have to install dependencies, compile code, start servers and open ports. At each step the errors are difficult to diagnose and time-consuming to fix.' But these problems extend to experienced coders, too: 'The simplest question we could ask about our application is "what is the current state." Bizarrely, very few programming environments give you any help on this front. Many programmers get by with nothing but print statements.' It's interesting to see somebody working on these issues, instead of accepting that they're the status quo and just part of the experience of programming."

Eclipse?

[drolli]

I mean, thats the elephant in the room, isnt it. I found that everything thich can be automated easily is automated in eclipse.

Re:Debuggers

[pla]

Communicating with, storing data in, retrieving data from, or otherwise intercepting and changing computer resources without consent is unauthorized access. It's against the law.

I can't tell if it worries me more that you think I would try to debug code on a system I hacked into... Or that you've never heard of low-end web hosting providers.

Real-world access permissions don't always match the ideal, and the fact that I can legally upload a CGI via FTP doesn't mean I can hook into a remote debugger. Dealing with an overly locked-down hosting company doesn't break the law, Scoutmaster AC.

Re:Debuggers

[gweihir]

Unfortunately, for Race Conditions and for Deadlocks, debuggers are mostly useless, as they change the runtime-characteristics. Typically, you end up with "Heisenbugs" that vanish or change dramatically as soon as you run under a debugger. Also if you think finding these by tests, you have already lost. You need to avoid these by design and find them with code-reviews and specialized tools.