[TUHS] Re: The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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I was going to keep silent on this one until I realized I disagree with
both Doug and Rob here (always a little dangerous). But because of personal
experience, I have a pretty strong opinion is not really a win.  Note that I
cribbed this email response from an answer I wrote on Quora to the
question:

*When you are programming and commit a minor error, such as forgetting a
semicolon, the compiler throws an error and makes you fix it for yourself.
Why doesn’t it just fix it by itself and notify you of the fix instead?*


FWIW: The first version of the idea that I now about was DWIM - *Do What I
Mean* feature from BBN’s LISP (that eventually made it into InterLISP). As
the Wikipedia page describes DWIM became known as "Damn Warren's Infernal
Machine" [more details in the DWIM section of the jargon file].  As Doug
points out, the original Pascal implementation for Unix, pix(1), also
supported this idea of fixing your code for you, and as Rob points out, UCB’s
pix(1) took the idea of trying to keep going and make the compile work from
the earlier Cornell PL/C compiler for the IBM 360[1], which to quote
Wikipedia:

“The PL/C compiler had the unusual capability of never failing to compile
> any program, through the use of extensive automatic correction of many
> syntax errors and by converting any remaining syntax errors to output
> statements.”


The problem is that people can be lazy, and instead of using " DWIM" as a
tool to speed up their development and fix their own errors, they just
ignore the errors. In fact, when we were teaching the “Intro to CS” course
at UCB in the early 1980s; we actually had students turn in programs that
had syntax errors in them because pix(1) had corrected their code -- instead
of the student fixing his/her code before handing the program into the TA
(and then they would complain when they got “marked down” on the assignment
— sigh).

IMO: All in all, the experiment failed because many (??most??) people
really don’t work that way. Putting a feature like this in an IDE or even
an editor like emacs might be reasonable since the sources would be
modified, but it means you need to like using an IDE. I also ask --> what
happens when the computer’s (IDE) guess is different from the programmer's
real intent, and since it was ‘fixed’ behind the curtain, you don’t notice
it?

Some other people have suggested that DWIM isn’t a little like spelling
‘auto-correct’ or tools like ‘Grammarly.’ The truth is, I have a love/hate
relationship with auto-correct, particularly on my mobile devices. I'm
dyslexic, so tools like this can be helpful to me sometimes, but I spend a
great deal of my time fighting these types of tools because they are so
often wrong, particularly with a small screen/keyboard, that it is just
“not fun.”

This brings me back to my experience. IMO, auto-correct for programming is
like DWIM all over again, and the cure causes more problems than it solves.

Clem

[1] I should add that after Cornell’s PL/C compiler was introduced, IBM
eventually added a similar feature to its own PL/1, although it was not
nearly as extensive as the Cornell solution. I’m sure you can find people
who liked it, but in both cases, I personally never found it that useful.

>
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