The important thing with syntax is to avoid the illusion of understanding. That's when the language user is confident that the syntax means one thing when it actually means something else. If the user is not sure what something means, they'll look it up in docs or maybe write a few toy examples to make sure it does what they think it does. Python's range() is ambiguous enough that I did this when I was learning the language. I was pretty sure it would create a range from 0 to 14, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't inclusive (0-15).
Examples of the illusion of understanding abound. These aren't all true for everyone, and HN users have been writing software long enough to have internalized many of them, but every language has them:
- Single equal as assignment. Almost every newbie gets bitten it. They see "=" and are confident that it means compare (especially if it's in a conditional).
- x ^ y means xor, not "raise x to the power of y"
- "if (a < b < c)" does not do what newbies think it does.
- JavaScript's this.
Sometimes syntax can make sense on its own, but create the illusion of understanding when combined with another bit of syntax. eg: Python newbies will write things like "if a == b or c" thinking that it will be true if a is equal to either b or c.
The illusion of understanding is the cause of some of the most frustrating troubleshooting sessions. It's the thing that causes newbies to say, "Fuck this. I'm going to do something else with my life."
>Examples of the illusion of understanding abound. These aren't all true for everyone, and HN users have been writing software long enough to have internalized many of them, but every language has them
>The illusion of understanding is the cause of some of the most frustrating troubleshooting sessions. It's the thing that causes newbies to say, "Fuck this. I'm going to do something else with my life."
About 14 years ago (give or take up to 4 years) I read about a study that was done at a prestigious CS university, where some tests were given entering CS students at the beginning of the course to see who was ok with arbitrary logic and syntax and who was not, IIRC it was 40% of the class who would get hung up on "but why" and "it doesn't make sense" and would end up failing but the ones who were able to cope with the arbitrary nature of things would graduate and the others would end up dropping out, changing studies.
About every couple of months I wish I could find that damn paper / study again.
NOTE: my memories of this study might also have been faded by the years, so...
Are you thinking of The Camel has Two Humps[1]? I don't think it was ever published in a journal and the author later retracted it.[2]
It seems like the conclusions of the study were overstated, but the general idea is correct: Those who apply rules consistently tend to do better at programming than those who don't. This is true even if their initial rules are incorrect, as they simply have to learn the new rules. They don't have to learn the skill of consistently applying rules.
I guess it is, it certainly seems like, although I had the memory that their main claim was that the ability to handle arbitrary mental models (not completely logical ones) was the differentiator between those who succeeded and not.
And embarrassingly this thing I've gone around believing for the last 14 years isn't so.
I think were JavaScript's this is concerned, it's different than the others - the others are just little tricky bits of syntax, this is it's own little problematic area of deep knowledge in the language.
It's more like saying people don't understand all of how pointers work in C.
Examples of the illusion of understanding abound. These aren't all true for everyone, and HN users have been writing software long enough to have internalized many of them, but every language has them:
- Single equal as assignment. Almost every newbie gets bitten it. They see "=" and are confident that it means compare (especially if it's in a conditional).
- x ^ y means xor, not "raise x to the power of y"
- "if (a < b < c)" does not do what newbies think it does.
- JavaScript's this.
Sometimes syntax can make sense on its own, but create the illusion of understanding when combined with another bit of syntax. eg: Python newbies will write things like "if a == b or c" thinking that it will be true if a is equal to either b or c.
The illusion of understanding is the cause of some of the most frustrating troubleshooting sessions. It's the thing that causes newbies to say, "Fuck this. I'm going to do something else with my life."