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Exposing The Most Frequent Mistakes In Programming

The Blackbox project is a massive data collection initiative by the University of Kent, that sifts through millions of source code compilations looking to identify the most frequent mistakes made by student programmers.

Why is that useful?
Understanding how students learn to program through their common misconceptions and their recurring mistakes is important for many reasons:
  • Produce educational material focused on these issues
  • Render educators more efficient
  • Build IDE's or programming tools that protect against those errors
  • Improve the readability and the helpfulness of the errors emitted by compilers
  • Language design - improve the future syntax and design of a language by taking into consideration the syntax barriers students typically encounter
full article on i-programmer.info

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