Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

I don't know of a single person who got so stuck on syntax errors that they quit

Try being a TA to freshmen CS majors; a good 1/3 change majors because they can't handle the syntax strictness coupled with their generally untrained logical mind. They convince themselves it is "too hard" and their buddies over in the business school are having a heck of a lot of fun throwing parties...

Sounds like CS is not for them, and they find something else to do which is more applicable to their skills and interest. This is good. I don't think you should see a high drop out rate from a course as necessarily indicating a problem.

Losing potentially good talent because they don't know how or where to look for mistakes yet is foolhardy. I'm happy for them to throw in the towel if the field is truly not for them, but I would wager that a not-insignificant portion of that crowd would be able to meaningfully progress once they get past the immediate hurdles in front of them.

Giving them an LLM to help with syntax errors, at this stage of the tech, is deeply unhelpful to their development.

The foundation of a computer science education is a rigorous understanding of what the steps of an algorithm mean. If the students don't develop that, then I don't think they're doing computer science anymore.

The use of a LLM in this case is to show them where the problem is so that they can continue on. They can't develop an understanding of the algorithm they're studying if they can't get their program to compile at all.

> Giving them an LLM to help with syntax errors, at this stage of the tech, is deeply unhelpful to their development.

I mean if the alternative is quitting entirely because they can't see that they've mixed tabs with spaces, then yes, it's very very helpful to their development.

Hi. Now you do.

I dropped out of cs half because I didn’t enjoy the coding because they dropped us into c++ and I found the error messages so confusing.

I discovered python five years later and discovered I loved coding.

( the other half of the reason is we spent two weeks designing an atm machine at a very abstract level and I thought the whole profession would be that boring.)

Added to which we already have tools that are great at finding syntax errors. They're called compilers.

Compilers can detect errors in the grammar, but they cannot infer what your desired intent was. Even the best compilers in the diagnostics business (rustc, etc) aren't mind-readers. A LLM isn't perfect, but it's much more capable of figuring out what you wanted to do and what went wrong than a compiler is.

none of that is a syntax issue, though, that's semantics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com