“You Have Said Too Much”: Java-Like Verbosity Anti-patterns in Python Codebases
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 OctDisplayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change
10:50 - 12:10 | |||
10:50 10mTalk | Chairs' Welcome SPLASH-E | ||
11:00 15mTalk | 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 15mTalk | 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 15mTalk | “You Have Said Too Much”: Java-Like Verbosity Anti-patterns in Python Codebases SPLASH-E DOI | ||
11:45 20mTalk | Reframing the Liskov Substitution Principle through the Lens of Testing SPLASH-E DOI |