> A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he i

> A programmer who truly sees his program as an extension of his own ego is not going to be trying to find all the errors in that program. On the contrary, he is going to be trying to prove that the program is correct – even if this means the oversight of errors which are monstrous to another eye. From the original 1989 "Version 1.0" of The Hacker Test[1]: 0477 Ever spend ten minutes trying to find a single-character error? 0478 ... More than an hour? 0479 ... More than a day? 0480 ... More than a week? 0481 ... Did the first person you show it to find it immediately? I don't know if this is caused by cognitive dissonance of the ego, "highway hypnosis"-style blindness from staring at your own code for too long, or something else. Regardless, programmers have always had this problem. [1] http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text http://www.hungry.com/~jamie/hacktest.text