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>Interesting. Power vs difficulty in debugging. Reminds me of this statement by Brian W. Kernighan, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the fir

>Interesting. Power vs difficulty in debugging. Reminds me of this statement by Brian W. Kernighan, "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."

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
This is all too harsh though. When you are doing something new, you aren't that sure what kind of extensibility and modularity you need internally, so you wind up over engineering and over architecting. Imagine you wanted to build a bridge without no one ever doing that before. It is an open problem, the resulting bridge might work, but it won't be pretty and probably used way too many materials, meaning it will be difficult to repair and upgrade. But your next bridge will be better, benefiting from the experience of the previous one, and you might be able to even do some design up front for the third one that actually sticks. Tl;dr get started on your first bridge early.
- dtjohnnymonkey 12y ago
  Your second bridge might not be better if this turns out to be true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_seco...
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    True, but in research it is expected. I would guess development is much more conservative.
  - erikpukinskis 12y ago
    The error is not building the second bridge, it's trying to create a new design from the ground up rather than improving on the first one.
_pmf_ 12y ago
> Reminds me of this statement by Brian W. Kernighan, "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." A corollary is that if you are writing code with minimum repetition, you are effectively a compression algorithm, not a programmer.
- delian66 12y ago
  > A corollary is that if you are writing code with minimum repetition, you are effectively a compression algorithm, not a programmer. I do not understand why that follows. Can you elaborate, please ?

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

This is all too harsh though. When you are doing something new, you aren't that sure what kind of extensibility and modularity you need internally, so you wind up over engineering and over architecting. Imagine you wanted to build a bridge without no one ever doing that before. It is an open problem, the resulting bridge might work, but it won't be pretty and probably used way too many materials, meaning it will be difficult to repair and upgrade. But your next bridge will be better, benefiting from the experience of the previous one, and you might be able to even do some design up front for the third one that actually sticks. Tl;dr get started on your first bridge early.

dtjohnnymonkey 12y ago
Your second bridge might not be better if this turns out to be true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_second-system_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_seco...
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  True, but in research it is expected. I would guess development is much more conservative.
- erikpukinskis 12y ago
  The error is not building the second bridge, it's trying to create a new design from the ground up rather than improving on the first one.

_pmf_ 12y ago

> Reminds me of this statement by Brian W. Kernighan, "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." A corollary is that if you are writing code with minimum repetition, you are effectively a compression algorithm, not a programmer.

delian66 12y ago
> A corollary is that if you are writing code with minimum repetition, you are effectively a compression algorithm, not a programmer. I do not understand why that follows. Can you elaborate, please ?