pythontutor.com

Last time I taught this class, I was made aware that when people are taught Python in CS classes, the the site pythontutor.com is recommended as a troubleshooting and learning resource. It looks pretty nice. For a short program, you can copy and paste it in, and then step through your program as it runs, line by line, to see how variables evolve. I’ll demo this a little bit in class as well when we work through how various Python functions operate. But if you have a program that is misbehaving, this is one good way to see where it is going wrong.

I have not played with it much really, but since I know about it from the beginning this semester, we’ll get a chance to see how useful it can be together. One downside is that you won’t be able to use it for anything that involves NLTK, so it’s good for logic, but for debugging NLTK-based issues, it will still be necessary to work locally.