Good lord, Steve, do you still use training wheels on your bike, too???SteveHopwood wrote:When I type in a line of code, I hit the compile button to ensure I have not done anything monumentally stupid. The furthest I will go without hitting the compile button is setting up an empty conditional or loop construct ...
Or, more apropos, when writing a forum post or an email, do you stop and run a spell checker after you type every few words?
May I gently suggest that this habit has probably been formed by rushing a bit too much and making too many careless typos and brainless mistakes? And that many of your copy/paste bloops probably hail from the same provenance?
Slow down there, bucko. I'm sure your mind is going a zillion kph and you're frustrated that your fingers can't keep up, but rushing just causes mistakes. And lots of them don't get caught by the compiler. Those are the ones that really eat your time (and your brain). Avoid one or two of those and you'll more than make up for the extra typing -- and **THINKING** -- time. A few minutes' care in coding will save you hours of debugging.
I'll bet you don't rush a sonata faster than you can play it, and you don't let your students do it either. You know what happens if they do. Don't do it with (/to) your coding and I can just about guarantee you'll become a more productive and less frustrated programmer.
