Do you remember when you first started programming (possibly with Python) and encountered an error message that completely baffled you? For some reason, perhaps because you were required to complete a formal course or because you were naturally persistent, you didn't let such messages discourage you entirely and you persevered. And now, whenever you see such cryptic error messages, you can almost immediately decipher them and figure out what causes them and fix the problem.
Congratulations, you are part of an elite group! Even a large number of people who claim that they can program are almost certainly less capable than you are.
Given your good fortune, would you mind donating 5 to 10 minutes of your time to help countless beginners that are struggling in trying to understand Python error messages? All you need to do is:
- Glance through of exceptions on this page and use your experience to find a case not covered. Note that this excludes SyntaxError cases, some of which are included here, but would require more of your time.
- Fire up your favourite Python REPL and write some simple code that generates an exception not already covered. Perhaps, something like ValueError: could not convert string to float: 'a'
- Create a new issue with the error message as the title, including the code that generated the exception in the description of the issue together with a simple explanation (in a couple of sentences) of what the error message means. Imagine that you are writing an explanation for the twelve year old child of your best friend who has expressed some interest in learning how to program. This simple explanation is the most important part ... however, do not worry about getting it absolutely perfect as it will likely be improved upon based on feedback from future "real beginners".
- Go back to whatever you were doing before, knowing that the few minutes you have invested will cumulatively save many hours to future generation of programmers that encounter the exception you wrote about.
It should go without saying that contributions that require more time and effort that what is described above are also very welcome! If you feel particularly ambitious, you can certainly improve the existing code that currently analyses cases of SyntaxError: invalid syntax, which currently handles only a few cases, and should be seen more as a prototype/proof-of-concept.
Future plans for friendly-traceback
Friendly-traceback is being written so that it could be easily incorporated into editors or IDEs that are designed for beginners. I intend to ensure that it can be easily added to Python's IDLE, as well as Mu and Thonny. I hasten to add that Thonny already includes an excellent tool (its "Assistant") which provides amazing feedback to beginners in some cases. Thonny's assistant uses a complementary approach to that of Friendly-traceback and it is quite likely that a future version of Friendly-traceback will include and expand upon the type of analysis performed by Thonny's assistant to help beginners. However, for the moment, the current development of Friendly-traceback is focused on breadth of coverage (i.e. increasing the number of exceptions included), providing a single most-likely explanation for each exception, rather than looking at multiple possible causes for a given exception as is done by Thonny's Assistant.
