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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.

More about this tip

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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Have students instantiate personal hall pass objects when they wish to leave the classroom to help them learn that the values passed to a constructor have to match the number, type, and order of the arguments in the method signature.
Show code where the name of the method’s actual arguments and formal parameters are different so students see first hand that these two items don’t have to match for code to execute and improve their understanding of scope.
Encourage students to ask their peers for a fresh set of eyes to help them find small, tedious errors and hidden bugs.

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