SPLASH 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 October 2021 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Wed 20 Oct 2021 11:30 - 11:45 at Zurich E - Session 1

As a popular language for teaching introductory programming, Java can profoundly influence beginner programmers with its coding style and idioms. Despite its many advantages, the paradigmatic coding style in Java is often described as verbose. As a result, when writing code in more concise languages, such programmers tend to emulate the familiar Java coding idioms, thus neglecting to take advantage of the more succinct counterparts in those languages. As a result of such verbosity, not only the overall code quality suffers, but the verbose non-idiomatic patterns also render code hard to understand and maintain. In this paper, we study the incidences of Java-like verbosity as they occur in Python codebases. We present a collection of Java-Like Verbosity Anti-Patterns and our pilot study of their presence in representative open-source Python codebases. We discuss our findings as a call for action to computing educators, particularly those who work with introductory students. We need novel pedagogical interventions that encourage budding programmers to write concise idiomatic code in any language.

Wed 20 Oct

Displayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change

10:50 - 12:10
Session 1SPLASH-E at Zurich E
10:50
10m
Talk
Chairs' Welcome
SPLASH-E
Charlie Curtsinger Grinnell College, Tien N. Nguyen University of Texas at Dallas
11:00
15m
Talk
Teaching DevOps: A Tale of Two Universities
SPLASH-E
Richard Hobeck TU Berlin, Ingo Weber TU Berlin, Len Bass Carnegie Mellon University, Hasan Yasar Carnegie Mellon University
DOI
11:15
15m
Talk
Ruggedizing CS1 Robotics: Tools and Approaches for Online Teaching
SPLASH-E
Boyd Anderson National University of Singapore, Martin Henz National University of Singapore, Hao-Wei Tee National University of Singapore
DOI
11:30
15m
Talk
“You Have Said Too Much”: Java-Like Verbosity Anti-patterns in Python Codebases
SPLASH-E
Yuzhi Ma Virginia Tech, Eli Tilevich Virginia Tech
DOI
11:45
20m
Talk
Reframing the Liskov Substitution Principle through the Lens of Testing
SPLASH-E
Elisa Baniassad University of British Columbia, Alexander J. Summers University of British Columbia
DOI