3 ms·

Sure, I’m not really saying every problem in software can be solved with a debugger. But not being able to easily narrow down which part of a system is breaking

• pjc50 7y ago
  > But not being able to easily narrow down which part of a system is breaking an invariant shouldn’t be an everyday occurrence I think there's a kind of reverse Amdahl's law at work here. Situations where there is a nice clean crash into the debugger that tells you what's going on are easy - so they don't take up much time. Situations where that doesn't work take much longer - maybe the problem doesn't replicate when you're using the debugger. And there have been situations where simply doing the data-gathering to establish that a bug was real consumes weeks. My own personal one of those was missed touchscreen events; because they were so infrequent we eventually had to set up a robot to press the screen 10,000 times, resulting in 9,999 touch events, and record a huge amount of data up and down the stack in order to work out what had happened.
  • thom 7y ago
    Then I shall count my blessings, both past and present.