(2022-11-17) Udell Debuggable Explanations

Jon Udell: Debuggable explanations. I’ve been reviewing Greg Wilson’s current book project, Software Design in Python.

The chapter on interpreters explains the basic mechanism using a mixture of prose and code. When I read the chapter I can sort of understand what’s happening, but I’m not great at mental simulation of running code. I need to run the code in a debugger, set breakpoints, step through execution, and watch variables change. Then it sinks in. (cf literate programming)

The GitHub repo for the book includes all the text and all the code. I’d like to put them side-by-side, so that as I read the narrative I can run and debug the code that’s being described. Here’s how I’m doing that in VSCode.

it wasn’t dead simple to get there.