shane_perry29•17d agoProlific Poster

Changed my mind about using notepad for coding after a workshop in Chicago

I always thought starting with a plain text editor was the way to learn, but someone at a free coding meetup in Chicago last month showed me how VS Code's color coding catches syntax errors instantly. Has anyone else had a simple tool like that save them hours of debugging?

2 comments

2 Comments

nelson.gavin17d ago

Notepad forces you to actually understand the code instead of relying on color hints. I learned Python in a terminal with no highlights and I can spot a missing colon or bracket in raw text way faster than someone who depends on the squiggly lines. Syntax checkers in VS Code can also give you a false sense of security. Saw a guy at a hackathon miss a logic error in his loop because the colors all looked right and the editor didn't flag it as wrong.

lunah8616d agoTop Commenter

Yeah, I ran into that same problem last year when I was helping a friend debug their Python script. They'd been using VS Code with all the bells and whistles, and the editor never flagged that they had a variable name collision because both were spelled right. The colors looked fine but the logic was totally broken. I've found that turning off linting for a bit and just reading through the raw text forces you to catch stuff your brain would skip over when the highlights are doing the work for you. Now I do my first pass on any code in a plain text editor before even opening an IDE.