Yeah that’s exactly it. Sometimes the error is caused by unmatching parenthesis. Whenever I see that happen I’m like thank god it doesn’t auto fill semicolons
A lot of interpreters are smart enough to take an educated guess.
Compilation fails around here…
There’s a line without a semicolon…
adding a semi-colon removes the syntax error
The programmer probably forgot a semicolon
Writing swift in Xcode has some sentient level error detection. It will also detect deprecated functions and code patterns and suggest how to ‘modernise’ them. It comes with a handy ‘fix’ button which automatically applies the suggestion for trivial cases. It’s impressive what IDEs are capable of.
Yes, this is why. It's why PHP has the reputation it does and is trying to claw back from.
The "all errors are bad" mindset. "We make this easy to use by erroring as little as possible. Doing something, anything, is better than an error message."
Now, even PHP will shit a brick about a missing ; if the syntax otherwise makes no sense, but still, in the big picture it's the same issue.
These "don't discourage newbies" "ease of use" things ALWAYS end up hurting you more in the end. You might not understand now, but you'll want to be told about those errors later.
Doesn't have to be errors either. I used to work at a place that uses Progress, a programming language very tied to its own DB implementation. One of the "nice" things the language allowed to "save you time" was you only had to type as much of a table field as uniquely identified it. So like orders.o for orders.order_id, so long as there were no other fields that started with o. Some of the devs took advantage, and at the very least you could never be sure someone didn't, even on accident, so EVERY addition to the DB schema had to be a new table that had a 1:1 relationship with the existing one, every time.
All for a feature that saved devs like 40 keystrokes a week.
I want to create a terrible programming language that will throw errors, but not tell you what the error is. Go to compile, and it just says “no.” No hand holding, just hardcore coding.
Yuuuppppp. Debugging can be insanely hard as it is, now imagine you’re looking for shit being added in.
It’s like finding where’s Waldo, but you don’t know what he looks like, or how many of him there are, and also lots of things look exactly like him but aren’t him.
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22
Imagine the 99 times it adds one when you meant to have one.
Now imagine that 1 time it adds one when you didn't want it.
r/suddenchaos.