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Comment by mikebenfield | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I completely disagree with your overall point, but:

> Nobody fails CS101 because they can't remember the syntax of function definition

I knew a couple people who cited essentially this reason as why they dropped their CS major: they found it really difficult to write anything that even compiled and couldn't deal with syntax errors like missing semicolons and whatnot.

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Interesting, I suppose I was fairly insulated from that experience as a TA for a class taught in Scheme. Perhaps that's part of the reason why it's such a good pedagogical language -- it's easy to resolve syntax errors and easy to debug obvious logical errors (e.g. invocation of a non-function) via powerful stepper tools.

Yeah. On pain of being a Smug Lisp Weenie: syntax sucks and shouldn't get in the way of logic. If your only syntax is parens and it directly maps the underlying logic (especially in pure-ish functional programming) then syntax errors just drop away.

I write Clojure and Python mostly. And while the former is overall more difficult than the latter, I never get anything like a syntax error in the former and often do in the latter (eg silly stuff like forgetting print is just a function in 3)

I've seen this too. I think some people are allergic to caring about details the way programmers must. Few other endeavors punish a wayward keystroke like this one.

Maybe that's a reasonable weed-out technique. How is somebody who's frustrated by an errant semicolon going to feel when they have to debug an ancient service mishandling UTF-8 characters? Until we teach machines to program for us attention to detail is just part of the job.

The root problem is that CS is owerwhelming if you don't have already some toy programming under belt.

Basically those people miss general basics we learned younger and then it is too much at the same time.

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