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Debugging is a fascinating experience. On the one hand, it's the Jungian shadow of design, forcing you to look at everything that's wrong and unintended and res
by gruseom 16y ago
Debugging is a fascinating experience. On the one hand, it's the Jungian shadow of design, forcing you to look at everything that's wrong and unintended and resistant to conscious control in your work. On the other hand, there's the thrill of the chase. I really started to enjoy debugging when it dawned on me that it always ends in a surprise. That follows trivially from the definition: if you knew what the problem was, you wouldn't be hunting for it. But experientially the surprises are often rather dramatic -- as if there's a built-in Agatha Christie plot generator -- and can be quite enjoyable as long as one's genius ego knows how to take a punch.
- scott_s 16y agoI love that thrill. I've gotten around the ego-punch by making "I can debug anything" part of my ego. With that thought in mind, I just don't give up.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- pmiller2 16y agoI concur with this thought. For me, the act of debugging is an act of pure problem solving, even more so than the act of programming. Why the hell is this code acting this way rather than the expected way? And what is the right way to fix it? Oftentimes, programming can be (almost) reduced to pasting together libraries and putting a nice UI on the resulting code[1], but debugging is always a fresh experience. [1] Of course, I know this is a total oversimplification.
- gruseom 16y agoYour comment reminds me of another thought I've had, which is that debugging is the part of programming that's closest to empirical science. You're faced with a piece of reality (a running system) and you don't know how it works.