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Prioritize straightforward, understandable code over unclear, shortcut-filled code to avoid confusion.

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  • If students cannot parse the code properly, they will not be able to understand what it is doing.
  • This is especially important for beginning students who miss fundamental concepts when trying to write elegant code without understanding the thinking behind it.

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Tags

  • Development Methods
  • Programming Concepts
External Source

“The ugliest beautiful line of code” (blog post) by Neil Brown

Other Tips By
Other Tips By Neil Brown

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Challenge students to place the fewest number of ice cream vans on a map of a town while maximizing ice cream availability to introduce the brute-force method in an accessible way.
Introduce a (sometimes silly) back-story for why students need to write particular methods to motivate them and see how their work might be needed in industry jobs.
Tell students that they have to fix their indentation before you’ll help them debug to encourage well-organized code.
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