Thread by @ShriramKMurthi

Since there are several ugrads and young grad students following here, let me answer the question: what comes next? We identified a problem; what can we do about it? ↵

https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1451595619592777740

One answer is to do what Slim suggests here. It's a GOOD answer. And it probably should be done in addition to everything else. But another is to step back and a question from first principles: ↵

https://twitter.com/sliminality/status/1451605188255567883

Why do we have this vocabulary at all? It's the bridge from the code to error to the code. It's a LEVEL OF INDIRECTION. And if the indirection doesn't work, communication breaks down: like an NFT whose server has gone down (-:. What can we do instead? ↵

In @PyretLang we decided to get rid of the indirection entirely! @tenellous implemented our beautiful errors, which many users love. Every term is colored (eagerly or lazily). Hovering causes the highlights in text, error code excerpt, and editor to all blink in unison. ↵

First, this gets rid of "what does the term mean": just follow the color or, if you didn't know you could, put your mouse over the underline and watch the blink. Second, maybe you'll even learn the vocabulary *from* the error message! ↵

Along the way we made the colors much more gentle and pleasant, unlike the stark red of DrRacket. The color choice is itself a fun topic. Teachers have been using them as pedagogic tools. All because of one sentence in a talk-aloud a decade ago! •
blog.brownplt.org/2018/06/11/phi…