So this article discusses the bugs in student code. Of course the majority of bugs in student code is going to be syntax errors that they won't grasp. But that is in the coding school. In the goal/plan based school a majority of the errors in code arise from constuct/implementation errors.

This article seemed very matter of fact to me...the information was not constuctive. It just summed up a study that examined the bugs of novice code. There were no surprises to me.

The only thing that caught my interest was the idea of "natural language based errors". That concept refers to students that know how to code in one language and make their designs and implementations based upon that constuct...I definitely see that problem. There are people that I know (they shall remain nameless) who, at the beginning of 32, decided that they would code their first project in java before coding it in C++. Now, because they are both OOP languages, it was not hard to switch from one to the other. But I can imagine that if you were used to coding in Java and had to code something in Pascal all of a sudden it would not be easy.

My first language that I learned was C++, but I would definitely say that my "natural language" is java. I didn't learn enough of C++ to fully understand it. I still don't know that much java. But the point is that when I was confronted with an aspect of C++ that carried over into java I did not recognize it. But I knew that concept last year, I guess that when you become out of practice you don't know what you are doing, or at least I don't...