Taming Java for the classroom

Hsia, James I.; Simpson, Elspeth; Smith, Daniel; Cartwright, Robert

doi:10.1145/1047124.1047459

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…However, dealing with CEMs is still a frustrating experience for students Hsia, Simpson, Smith, and Cartwright, 2005). Jadud goes as far as stating that compilers are "veritable gold mines for cryptic and confusing error messages" (Jadud, 2006, p. 1), while Traver (2010, p. 4) describes Java errors in particular as "undecipherable".…”

Section: Compiler Error Messagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Becker

Glanville

Iwashima

et al. 2016

Computer Science Education

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Programming is an essential skill that all computing students must master. However programming can be difficult to learn. Compiler error messages are crucial for correcting errors, but are often difficult to understand and pose a barrier to progress for many novices. High frequencies of errors, particularly repeated errors, have been shown to be indicators of students who are struggling with learning to program. This study involves a custom IDE that enhances Java compiler error messages, intended to be more useful to novices than those supplied by the compiler. The effectiveness of this approach was tested in an empirical control/intervention study of approximately 200 students generating almost 50,000 errors. The design allows for direct comparisons between enhanced and non-enhanced error messages. Results show that the intervention group experienced reductions in the number of overall errors, errors per student, and several repeated error metrics. This work is important for two reasons. First, the effects of error message enhancement have been recently debated in the literature. This study provides substantial evidence that it can be effective. Second, these results should be generalizable at least in part, to other programming languages, students and institutions, as we show that the control group of this study is comparable to several others using Java and other languages.

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Section: Compiler Error Messagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Becker

Glanville

Iwashima

et al. 2016

Computer Science Education

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“…This idea is not new. The same basic principle is at work in development environments which support language levels [8,9,11]. The students' environment should behave exactly as they expect it to behave, based on their current knowledge.…”

Section: Why Use a Customizable Tool?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Green

Alphonce

Martin

2005

Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA Workshop on Eclipse Technology eXchange - Eclipse '05

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UML class diagrams are used quite commonly in CS1-CS2 courses and textbooks. The benefits of using these diagrams include providing a programming-language independent way of communicating program design, in an industry standard language. While drawing diagrams by hand is in itself useful, beginning students do not always perceive the benefit of designing before coding, and create these diagrams only if they have to, and then only as an afterthought.We have found that students are much more receptive to using UML class diagrams as an integral part of their development if they see immediate benefits from doing so. This paper describes Green, a simple to use yet flexible and extensible UML class diagramming tool. Green (an Eclipse plug-in) provides complete roundtripping between code and class diagram. This capability makes it easy for students to alternate between a detailed code-level view and a more abstract design view of their projects. With this capability students see creating class diagrams not as a separate and tedious activity, but as an easy way to turn designs into code and to discover the design of existing code.Green's distinguishing features when compared to similar tools are that it has been developed to meet the needs of CS1-CS2 students, the semantics of its relationships are customizable, additional class relationships can be defined and it is integrated with Eclipse, a mature development environment.

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“…For example, there are situations where a Generic Java expression must be cast to type T where T is a type parameter. This form of casting operation appears several times in the code base of DrJava [12], an open source pedagogic programming environment with an embedded interpreter that we have developed in Generic Java. Even the early access version of the Java 1.5 compiler [15] included this form of unchecked operation for several iterations until a significant refactoring worked around the problem [6].…”

Section: Gj Type Erasure and Safe Instantiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe instantiation in Generic Java

Allen

Cartwright

2006

Science of Computer Programming

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This paper introduces the "Safe Instantiation Principle", a new design criterion for evaluating extensions of Java that support generic types. The paper initially focuses on the GJ and NextGen formulations of Generic Java and the implications of safe instantiation for both approaches. Then it applies the safe instantiation principle to the problem of adding mixins to Java as generic types. Finally, it shows that the hygienic formulation of mixins is the only way to maintain safe instantiation and type soundness in Java with mixins and to prevent the introduction of insidious bugs with no clearly defined point of blame.

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Taming Java for the classroom

Cited by 16 publications

References 3 publications

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Green

Safe instantiation in Generic Java

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