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I remember stepping through many programs when I started programming as a teenager. It was quite fascinating to see everything in slow-motion. Over the years,

by mtrn 11y ago

I remember stepping through many programs when I started programming as a teenager. It was quite fascinating to see everything in slow-motion. Over the years, I had less and less use for intense debugging sessions, but I've been reading and writing logs all the time. Today, I see server side code without logging statements, I immediately ask myself, how do the authors debug this thing? Related: > If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging - they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

henrik_w 11y ago
Had to google the quote about wasting your time debugging to see that it was from "The Humble Programmer". I completely disagree with it! There will always be bugs. It's good to strive to avoid making mistakes, but however hard you try, there will be bugs. It is counter-productive to pretend there won't be any.
- userbinator 11y ago
  It's good to strive to avoid making mistakes, but however hard you try, there will be bugs. That's basically what the quote is implying - you should not be throwing things together and hoping it will work after debugging, but carefully designing to avoid bugs, so there won't be much if any debugging required. An analogy to this can be found in the aviation industry: it's known that pilots do make errors and planes do crash, but such errors are treated as unacceptable and they try their hardest to minimise them. It's been a very successful strategy.
  - taeric 11y ago
    All too often, the "carefully designing" becomes some sort of masochistic ritual where all errors are attempted to be piped through a single tool in the dev chain. Static typing is popular nowdays. As are high level functional strategies. It is great when these work. Or when you have a high level team that doesn't abuse the system at all and gets things done using these strategies. I have seen too many times where the result is a system that even the creator does not fully understand. Worse, what should be simple changes turn into giant modifications of a Rube Goldberg machine.
    - mannykannot 11y ago
      Just because it can be done badly is not a reason for abandoning it. To continue the aviation analogy, the solution there was to ensure that the people designing airplanes have had fairly rigorous training and that they have an adequate understanding of the relevant theory.
      - taeric 11y ago
        Apologies for missing this earlier. I was not advocating for quitting. I was advocating for using more than a single tool.

by mtrn 11y ago

henrik_w 11y ago

Had to google the quote about wasting your time debugging to see that it was from "The Humble Programmer". I completely disagree with it! There will always be bugs. It's good to strive to avoid making mistakes, but however hard you try, there will be bugs. It is counter-productive to pretend there won't be any.

userbinator 11y ago
It's good to strive to avoid making mistakes, but however hard you try, there will be bugs. That's basically what the quote is implying - you should not be throwing things together and hoping it will work after debugging, but carefully designing to avoid bugs, so there won't be much if any debugging required. An analogy to this can be found in the aviation industry: it's known that pilots do make errors and planes do crash, but such errors are treated as unacceptable and they try their hardest to minimise them. It's been a very successful strategy.
- taeric 11y ago
  All too often, the "carefully designing" becomes some sort of masochistic ritual where all errors are attempted to be piped through a single tool in the dev chain. Static typing is popular nowdays. As are high level functional strategies. It is great when these work. Or when you have a high level team that doesn't abuse the system at all and gets things done using these strategies. I have seen too many times where the result is a system that even the creator does not fully understand. Worse, what should be simple changes turn into giant modifications of a Rube Goldberg machine.
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    Just because it can be done badly is not a reason for abandoning it. To continue the aviation analogy, the solution there was to ensure that the people designing airplanes have had fairly rigorous training and that they have an adequate understanding of the relevant theory.
    - taeric 11y ago
      Apologies for missing this earlier. I was not advocating for quitting. I was advocating for using more than a single tool.