It doesn’t feel very fundamental. How commonly they crop up, and how easy they are to debug have much to do with your editor, coding style and interpreter/compiler.
the use of long’ish descriptive identifiers makes it less likely that single typos collide with other valid names, while text-completion largely eliminates single-character typos as a class of error.
syntax highlighting provides a useful form of spell-checking
consistent formatting makes it difficult to accidentally hide ‘structural typos’, especially given editor support (mainly brace matching).
These sorts of concerns are very amenable to technical solutions, which are commonly implemented to various degrees. But even if they were completely eliminated, programming wouldn’t be that much easier. My boss would still be making fun of me for staring off into space for long stretches while I’m thinking through a problem.
This is exactly analogous to typos vs defects of argument in prose. Yes, spell-checking will miss typos that collide with valid words, but it feels off to claim this as a deep insight into the nature of writing.
It doesn’t feel very fundamental. How commonly they crop up, and how easy they are to debug have much to do with your editor, coding style and interpreter/compiler.
the use of long’ish descriptive identifiers makes it less likely that single typos collide with other valid names, while text-completion largely eliminates single-character typos as a class of error.
syntax highlighting provides a useful form of spell-checking
consistent formatting makes it difficult to accidentally hide ‘structural typos’, especially given editor support (mainly brace matching).
These sorts of concerns are very amenable to technical solutions, which are commonly implemented to various degrees. But even if they were completely eliminated, programming wouldn’t be that much easier. My boss would still be making fun of me for staring off into space for long stretches while I’m thinking through a problem.
This is exactly analogous to typos vs defects of argument in prose. Yes, spell-checking will miss typos that collide with valid words, but it feels off to claim this as a deep insight into the nature of writing.