4 ms·

Not an intelligent quotation. Hardness can be defined as how long it takes to accomplish a task. Following this definition everything can be debugged. It just t

Not an intelligent quotation. Hardness can be defined as how long it takes to accomplish a task. Following this definition everything can be debugged. It just takes twice as long. This definition isn't absolute and neither is the definition by Brian. The truth is much more complicated.

Retric 3y ago
Your premise is false, time to completion and difficulty are not equivalent. Believing such implies it’s more difficult to ride in an aircraft craft around the world than legitimately beat Magnus Carlsen in a rapid chess game. The reverse is frequently the case where running a marathon faster is more difficult than doing so slower.
- corethree 3y ago
  It's as "false" as his premise of relating difficulty to intelligence. My point is the existence of an alternative statement that is equally and fuzzily true shows that this quote is not really that intelligent. Reread my post. I literally said neither definition is absolutely true.
  - Retric 3y ago
    I understood what your post was saying, but they they aren’t fuzzy equivalents. The basic premise is just false. Further the quote wasn’t suggesting equivalency. Rather intelligence as one bound on debugging, which is clearly true as can’t get a flatworm to do it. When trying to debug really clever code the easiest solution can be giving up and starting from scratch.
    - corethree 3y ago
      Wrong. A more complex program has more possible origins for the bug. So you need to make more hypothesises to check and verify the bug. Time and intelligence are both a factor here. Sometimes one more than the other. Clearly you don't think bugs are all solved in seconds and limited only based off of intelligence. A harder bug often needs more time to solve. This is common sense. You're just sinking with the ship now.
      - Retric 3y ago
        > A more complex program has more possible origins for the bug. So you need to make more hypothesises to check and verify the bug. This isn’t a discussion about all bugs but the class of bugs created from dealing with clever code. Very difficult bugs may be fairly quick to solve in comparison to simple bugs that require some long process to replicate. Time to solve really doesn’t map well to difficulty. >Clearly you don't think bugs are all solved in seconds and limited only based off of intelligence. False, you clearly missed me stating it intelligence was “one” limitation not the only limitation. Poor tooling can be a massive pain among many other things. Again though this is talking about debugging a very specific kind of unnecessarily complex code.
        corethree 3y ago
        >This isn’t a discussion about all bugs but the class of bugs created from dealing with clever code. Very difficult bugs may be fairly quick to solve in comparison to simple bugs that require some long process to replicate. Time to solve really doesn’t map well to difficulty. It does. A bug solved in seconds is usually considered less difficult than one solved in weeks. It maps easily. >False, you clearly missed me stating it intelligence was “one” limitation not the only limitation. Poor tooling can be a massive pain among many other things. Again though this is talking about debugging a very specific kind of unnecessarily complex code. The quote was suggesting absolutism one limitation. By showing the existence of an equivalency I've shown the quote is not absolute. Therefore the quote is not intelligent. Therefore your statement is false and nonsensical.
        Retric 3y ago
        > It does. A bug solved in seconds is usually considered less difficult than one solved in weeks. It maps easily. Luck wildly impacts how long ‘difficult’ problems take to solve. I’ve solved bugs in seconds someone literally spent weeks and asked multiple people to help them solve and I’ve had the same thing happen to me. Thus actual solve time and absolute difficulty are almost orthogonal. > The quote was suggesting absolutism one limitation. By showing the existence of an equivalency I've shown the quote is not absolute. Therefore the quote is not intelligent. Therefore your statement is false and nonsensical. Again no, it was saying one limitation becomes significant in a specific situation. Often these bugs may not actually take long to fix, but you’ll suffer when dealing with them. Even strait forward off by one errors can be annoying when you have to reason about really tricky bits of code. That feeling where you spend an hour staring at an IDE with absolutely no clue what’s going on sucks even if it doesn’t take that long to actually fix the issue.

Retric 3y ago

Your premise is false, time to completion and difficulty are not equivalent. Believing such implies it’s more difficult to ride in an aircraft craft around the world than legitimately beat Magnus Carlsen in a rapid chess game. The reverse is frequently the case where running a marathon faster is more difficult than doing so slower.

corethree 3y ago
It's as "false" as his premise of relating difficulty to intelligence. My point is the existence of an alternative statement that is equally and fuzzily true shows that this quote is not really that intelligent. Reread my post. I literally said neither definition is absolutely true.
- Retric 3y ago
  I understood what your post was saying, but they they aren’t fuzzy equivalents. The basic premise is just false. Further the quote wasn’t suggesting equivalency. Rather intelligence as one bound on debugging, which is clearly true as can’t get a flatworm to do it. When trying to debug really clever code the easiest solution can be giving up and starting from scratch.
  - corethree 3y ago
    Wrong. A more complex program has more possible origins for the bug. So you need to make more hypothesises to check and verify the bug. Time and intelligence are both a factor here. Sometimes one more than the other. Clearly you don't think bugs are all solved in seconds and limited only based off of intelligence. A harder bug often needs more time to solve. This is common sense. You're just sinking with the ship now.
    - Retric 3y ago
      > A more complex program has more possible origins for the bug. So you need to make more hypothesises to check and verify the bug. This isn’t a discussion about all bugs but the class of bugs created from dealing with clever code. Very difficult bugs may be fairly quick to solve in comparison to simple bugs that require some long process to replicate. Time to solve really doesn’t map well to difficulty. >Clearly you don't think bugs are all solved in seconds and limited only based off of intelligence. False, you clearly missed me stating it intelligence was “one” limitation not the only limitation. Poor tooling can be a massive pain among many other things. Again though this is talking about debugging a very specific kind of unnecessarily complex code.
      - corethree 3y ago
        >This isn’t a discussion about all bugs but the class of bugs created from dealing with clever code. Very difficult bugs may be fairly quick to solve in comparison to simple bugs that require some long process to replicate. Time to solve really doesn’t map well to difficulty. It does. A bug solved in seconds is usually considered less difficult than one solved in weeks. It maps easily. >False, you clearly missed me stating it intelligence was “one” limitation not the only limitation. Poor tooling can be a massive pain among many other things. Again though this is talking about debugging a very specific kind of unnecessarily complex code. The quote was suggesting absolutism one limitation. By showing the existence of an equivalency I've shown the quote is not absolute. Therefore the quote is not intelligent. Therefore your statement is false and nonsensical.
        Retric 3y ago
        > It does. A bug solved in seconds is usually considered less difficult than one solved in weeks. It maps easily. Luck wildly impacts how long ‘difficult’ problems take to solve. I’ve solved bugs in seconds someone literally spent weeks and asked multiple people to help them solve and I’ve had the same thing happen to me. Thus actual solve time and absolute difficulty are almost orthogonal. > The quote was suggesting absolutism one limitation. By showing the existence of an equivalency I've shown the quote is not absolute. Therefore the quote is not intelligent. Therefore your statement is false and nonsensical. Again no, it was saying one limitation becomes significant in a specific situation. Often these bugs may not actually take long to fix, but you’ll suffer when dealing with them. Even strait forward off by one errors can be annoying when you have to reason about really tricky bits of code. That feeling where you spend an hour staring at an IDE with absolutely no clue what’s going on sucks even if it doesn’t take that long to actually fix the issue.