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To quote a man I consider to be both, very intelligent and wise: > Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write t
by qayxc 6y ago
To quote a man I consider to be both, very intelligent and wise:
> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
- woofie11 6y agoI don't consider that man particularly wise. Clever has many different axes. Compare debugging something like git or hg (clever, simple data structure) to cvs or svn (non-clever, standard data structure). Systems like git and hg don't just do more; they're also far more debuggable thanks to clever. That's not an IOCCC type of cleverness, but a deep, deep clever. Likewise, consider general-purpose data stores (such as a KVS or an RDBMS) compared to a one-off data structures mapping directly to your data. The design of the original RDBMS was hyper-clever. A wise man knows when to be clever and when not to be clever. I don't know of any programming language designer who can make that determination for me; it's too domain-specific. If you can rely on programmers to not be clever for inane reasons, you can allow them to be clever for architecturally-critical reasons.
- dahart 6y ago> I don’t consider that man particularly wise. You don’t think Brian Kernighan is wise?