When writing some simple Python script in Spyder code editor, I always feel envious of computer science people every time its linting tool points some silly mistake I do, for example, forgetting a ":" in the end of a function definition, or using a "=" instead of "==" in a logic expression. I think myself, why can't we have such nice things in computational chemistry too. Why so much pain?
It's very unpleasant when you're starting your career as a aspiring computational chemist, and you find yourself losing a lot of time, in anger and frustration, just because your input file doesn't run, and you're left only with some cryptic error message to figure out the problem. Sometimes a silly mistake, a single missing blank line, or a typo somewhere can make you lose hours. If you search the web, you will find countless people asking for help with problems like these, see for example Gaussian Error: Zero Point Energy Calculation on Fluoroform fails or Gaussian syntax error on the input line.
Every time you have to figure out how to use a new tool, is the same history, the same pain, and there are dozens to learn. Sometimes you find some kind soul to help you in questions like these, but sometimes you just receive some nasty answers that amount to RTFM, probably because somebody heard the same question 1000 times before and got tired.
I think a simple text editor with syntax highlighting and something akin to linting for quantum chemistry input files would go a long way into alleviating this problem.
I wonder why have we no such tools already. It's like the if the wheel have not been invented yet. Perhaps the default in the field is stick to the von Neumann approach and just withstand it until you became a paid professor, then you can lose your students time instead of yours. Why worry about ergonomics, with so much cheap labor? Just let them bang their heads in the keyboard until it works, while we enjoy reading our papers.
