Coding is unforgiving af for beginners
Tags: beginners, codenewbie, decodingcoding
Published: 2021-09-29 23:08:58

---
title: Coding is unforgiving af for beginners
published: true
description: It’s like failing a writing exam because you had ONE spelling error.
tags: beginners, codenewbies, decodingcoding
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8uc85znl5mjp896sjbek.jpg
---

*Warning: Code newbie rant incoming.*

I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out why my script didn't work. Can you [see why](https://bit.ly/2QWV1P8)?

```
<div id="resizable"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">

  $("#resizeable").resizable()

</script>
```

All because of ONE "e". Resizable vs resizeable. One tweeny lack of alertness, and everything breaks. The problem is most code editors can't pick up spelling errors/mismatches like that. The level of accuracy needed for human beings to code - perfect and error-ZERO - is like asking human beings to _be_ computers. 

There's something wrong with this. We've got things the wrong way round. I understand that computers need very precise instructions to be able to execute a command. But to expect that same level of syntactic precision in human beings...is unrealistic. We have limited energy levels, our attention wavers, we get distracted easily, and after staring at the same words for some time, we miss the trees for the forest. And this also doesn't take into account cultural differences where we spell words differently (color vs colour, anyone? Accordian or accordion?), or people who's native language is not English and not really proficient in it, which significantly increases the error rate. 

This is so frustrating. 

Code is computer-centric, not human-centred. The user experience of coding is broken. Our tools should defer to us, not the other way round! There's not much one can do about it. The syntax is fixed. Apologies if it's beginning to read like a child's tantrum here. I'm just a code rookie ranting, but because I'm still new to this, I find myself questioning how things are done, and how things _should_ be done. Maybe you're a code veteran and you'd developed a great workflow to prevent this from happening. Double-check your work. Get someone else to look at it for you. Take a break and come back to it. Etc etc. 

_I get it_. 

But that's still a work-around. That's still us being slave to our tools. 

***How many productive developer hours worldwide are wasted because of stupid mistakes like this?*** Every minute a developer wastes trying to solve spelling mistakes, a kitten dies.

I detest this, because this is a solvable problem (or "solveable"??). This is a **design problem**. As a designer, I see it clearly enough. When the syntax and the tools are designed at the onset, the authors probably didn't think that it's important to account for human failings like these. 

Something that works similar to a normal dictionary/spelling feature in MS Word might help somewhat with checking for inconsistencies. The ideal would be something that can check for mismatches between e.g. your style classes/ids versus what's written elsewhere in the head/body/script sections.  Why isn't this already a thing? Is there a Brackets/VS Code extension somewhere that does this? 

I'll be super happy to be proven wrong in this case.  

---

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