Europe Research Interest Group Meeting [December 2022]

EduLint: A Python linter for novice programmers by Anna Řechtáčková

Code quality matters. Following best practices and avoiding antipatterns helps to make the code more readable, maintainable, or easier to debug. Novice programmers usually do not know these practices and often need to be made aware of them through a code review by a more experienced programmer. This creates significant time and personnel requirements (e.g., in the introductory programming course at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, creating the feedback takes over 2000 person-hours every semester). While some problems are challenging to discover automatically (misleading variable names, ill-suited decomposition), some problems (usually those related to overly complicated code structure) can be detected by static analysis. Providing automatic feedback about these easily detectable problems (leaving only the challenging ones to the TAs) is the goal of the newly-developed linter EduLint, which will be presented in this talk.

Anna Řechtáčková is a student of Theoretical Informatics, specializing in Principles of Programming Languages at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University. She did her bachelor’s thesis on static analysis of C programs for the verification tool Symbiotic. For her master’s thesis, she is developing EduLint, a linter for novice programmers. For the past three years, Anna has been a teaching assistant at FI MU, leading seminars and reviewing students’ code.