[BioRuby] BioRuby Digest, Vol 77, Issue 20

[Russell Whitaker]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 3:28 AM, Yannick Wurm <yannick.wurm at unil.ch> wrote:
>
> Have you watched some noobs code? I was surprised to see that some biopython users
> new to programming don't actually ever execute whole scripts. Instead, they use the python shell...
> and copy-paste individual lines or blocks of code from their MS Word document. Similarly to the
> manner in which most run analyses in R.
> Going line by line & seeing where things screw up definitely reduces the initial hurdle.
> I wish I had known about 'Bioruby in the shell' when I started...
>

This isn't only a practice of novices: I've been doing software
construction for a couple
of decades, and I explore code this way all the time, e.g. inspecting
the state of objects
in the interactive interpreter shell, determining the specific types
of exceptions thrown in
corner cases while writing TDD/BDD test cases in parallel, etc. These
novices are
intuitively using their code exploration tools to understand the
mechanics of what they're
doing.

By the way, I prefer the term "novice" to "noob" or even "newbie": the
tone of "noob"
- intentionally or not - seems to imply a bit of condescension toward
those early in their
personal learning curves, and could be considered exclusionary.

-- 
Russell Whitaker
http://twitter.com/OrthoNormalRuss / http://orthonormalruss.blogspot.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/russell-whitaker/0/b86/329