in reply to Seven habits of highly careful coders

When I first read this title, I thought it was going to be a meditation on "defensive programming". When I think "careful", I think of safe practices. Wearing condoms, chroot()ing daemons and such.
7. Did I read what is on the screen?
This is tough to take seriously.

-- am

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Re: Re: Seven habits of highly careful coders
by shenme (Priest) on Sep 14, 2003 at 15:56 UTC
    Not really.   I've worked with people who can describe at length what they are doing and why it works and how wonderful it is... but what they've typed in isn't that.   There is a pattern of failure, not seeing the actual code for the glow of what it was _meant_ to be.

    I've sometimes wanted to ask them to get up, walk around the room, sit down again and *read* what they've typed.

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      By experience, I found out that my best coding used to come at ocassions when I lost my papers and I had to write all over again by memory...
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        Although the pattern you deseribe requires poor documentation and orginization (must you still place your hand on the glowing red stove burner to realize it be hot) -- I agree that a complete refactoring many times can output much better code. It allows you to break out of the loop and look at the problem in a new way.

        -Waswas
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Re^2: Seven habits of highly careful coders
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Sep 18, 2003 at 08:55 UTC
    This is tough to take seriously.

    Not really. I've certainly spent many an hour in the past looking right at a buggy piece of code, but missing it because I'm seeing what should be there, rather than what actually is there.

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In Section Meditations