Python Helpful Interactive Linter (PHIL)

Inspiration

Starting your first programming project can be a daunting task. It takes a lot of courage to learn the language, think through the logic, write the code, and finally press that run button. However, seeing those squiggly red lines and the dense and confusing error message can be very discouraging. Falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of google searches, stackoverflow discussions, and youtube videos, it can be hard to remember what all of this was even for. As more and more research projects incorporate programming, many students are diving into their first programming projects. We wanted to create a friendly environment that helps those beginning programmers parse through the error message and provide guidance in troubleshooting.

What it does

We created PHIL to be a convenient extension for the popular IDE, VS Code. PHIL takes the error message output and breaks it down into a friendly message with suggestions for quick fixes, links to helpful explanations, and tutorials to common Python compiler error messages in a way that is easy to comprehend for beginning programmers.

How we built it

We read through common Python exceptions and researched errors we determined would be commonly experienced by beginning programmers. We organized the researched information into suggestions, links, and tutorials and wrote it into a text file. We then wrote a python program that reads the text file and prints out a new, friendly, and customized compiler error message with our suggestions and resources.

Challenges we ran into

We initially struggled with trying to develop our product using only Javascript, but decided to use Python because it offered the functionality we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We improved the efficiency of our code by automating reading in the text file contents instead of hard coding our suggestions. Also, this was the first hackathon experience for all members of the project, so we are extremely proud of being able to finish and submit a project!

What we learned

We learned how to split up tasks efficiently and ultimately piece together our parts into a final, single product. We also learned a lot about common python errors and how to fix them.

What's next for Phil

We would like to expand the scope of our error suggestions to encompass a more comprehensive list of errors, and potentially improve the way we process our custom error messages. Additionally, we realize that programs are always improving. We hope to incorporate a method to analyze web searches for common errors that will help customize the errors and write out the results in our text format to keep the suggestions and resources up to date.