JRMayne comments on Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alicorn 09 July 2010 06:54AM

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Comment author: JRMayne 10 July 2010 03:06:37AM 5 points [-]

Proceed from 0 to x, in increments of 1, (where x =whatever) If divisible by 3, remainder 0, associate fizz with number If divisible by 5, remainder 0, associate buzz with number, Make ordered list from o to x, of numbers associated with fizz OR buzz For numbers associated with fizz NOT buzz, append fizz For numbers associated with buzz NOT fizz, append fizz For numbers associated with fizz AND buzz, append fizzbuzz

I don't know anything about FizzBuzz, but your program generates no buzzes and lots of fizzes (appending fizz to numbers associated only with fizz or buzz.) This is not a particularly compelling demonstration of your point that it should be easy.

(I'm not a programmer, at least not professionally. The last serious program I wrote was 23 years ago in Fortran.)

Comment author: sketerpot 10 July 2010 08:34:38PM *  5 points [-]

The bug would have been obvious if the pseudocode had been indented. I'm convinced that a large fraction of beginner programming bugs arise from poor code formatting. (I got this idea from watching beginners make mistakes, over and over again, which would have been obvious if they had heeded my dire warnings and just frickin' indented their code.)

Actually, maybe this is a sign of a bigger conceptual problem: a lot of people see programs as sequences of instructions, rather than a tree structure. Indentation seems natural if you hold the latter view, and pointless if you can only perceive programs as serial streams of tokens.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 10 July 2010 10:20:30PM 5 points [-]

I got this idea from watching beginners make mistakes, over and over again, which would have been obvious if they had heeded my dire warnings and just frickin' indented their code.

This seems to predict that python solves this problem. Do you have any experience watching beginners with python? (Your second paragraph suggests that indentation is just the symptom and python won't help.)

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