Showerthought: I see a lot of new coders skip the basic error messages.

I was helping my cousin learn Python last week, and he kept hitting run, seeing a red error, and instantly closing it to ask me for help. I made him read the error out loud. It literally said 'NameError: name 'prinnt' is not defined' on line 7. He just never looked. I think new people get scared by the red text and miss that it's the best help you can get. It tells you the problem and where to look. How do you get comfortable reading those messages instead of panicking?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_jordan1mo ago

It's not just new coders. I've seen experienced folks gloss over the line number, which is the real key.

clairer7913d agoMost Upvoted

Oh yeah, "the real key" right? More like the real slap in the face when you waste 20 minutes looking at the wrong line. I swear my brain treats line numbers like those captcha boxes you just blindly click through. You'd think after the hundredth time of staring at line 47 when the actual error is on line 48, I'd learn. Nope. Still scroll right past it like it's invisible. Maybe we need a browser extension that flashes a warning every time we skip a line number. At this point I'm convinced our brains have a built-in "ignore line numbers" filter that only kicks in during debugging.

nina_harris391mo ago

Yeah, @the_jordan is right about the line number. Read an article once that said our brains just skip right past it to the error text. Makes you look twice now.