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“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

by teddyh 4y ago

“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.” — Brian Kernighan

frou_dh 4y ago
That doesn't really refute the point that Carmack made. Namely that a lot of the supposed inherent difficulty in the endeavour of debugging is actually incidental from a general cultural attachment to crap old tooling.
- teddyh 4y ago
  And I believe the point of Kernighan, as well as Torvalds, is that the difficulty of debugging serves as a bulwark against over-complicated code.
  - frou_dh 4y ago
    So that's why ed(1) is the standard text editor. Anything more usable is a dangerous extravagance! :)
TinkersW 4y ago
Sounds like Brian has never used a good debugger
- pjmlp 4y ago
  UNIX has never been the place of cool graphical debugging anyway.