Open gvwilson opened 7 months ago
Thanks @gvwilson, this is great feedback :)
I've talked about a tool to make it easier for beginners and novices to prevent these types of errors on zulip. What do you think about a tool like that? If it works well we can try to include it in the compiler.
Added a note on zulip: "I can see the value of the tool that @Anton-4 suggests, but I think that better/slimmer error messages should be the priority. In particular, I think what I'm seeing (as a novice) is cascading error messages: if there's a way to say, "we spotted four other problems but we think they're all related to the one we showed you first", that would be very helpful for newcomers."
Working through the Roc tutorial, I wanted to write a function that printed things, so I tried this:
roc dev example.roc
produced this:I believe a lot of novices will assume
Stdout.line
is Roc's equivalent ofprint
and will then put it in their functions. They won't yet have seen tasks, so the error message above will be incomprehensible. (I had to read quite far ahead in the Roc tutorial and look at a couple of examples in order to start to understand the problem.) While I don't often ask for error messages to be shortened, I think this might be a good candidate. Alternatively, can some other form of output be introduced earlier so that people don't even try to do what I did?