[Pythonedu-wg] A new, kid-friendly Python editor

[Alex Bradbury]

On 21 September 2015 at 14:15, Carrie Anne Philbin
<carrieanne at raspberrypi.org> wrote:
> - Error reporting that highlights lines and gives a good level of feedback
> to the user.

Just to expand on this one a little, I think there's a lot of
potential for providing more user-friendly error messages. Khan
Academy's online JS environment goes to at least some effort in this
direction (https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/new/pjs).
e.g. it will look at the Levenshtein edit distance to suggest variable
or method names you might have meant. There's also room for printing
something more direct and easier to understand for simple cases like
forgetting to close a string.

This kind of thing is definitely a nice feature for this IDE, but a
tool that takes in Python error messages and spits out beautiful easy
to understand descriptions of what you might have done wrong could
potentially be a separate project/library.

Alex