Oddly enough, I see a parallel to morality problems here. In college, philosophy professors would pose a problem like the following:

Your plane crashes in the jungle. Everyone lives, but is captured by rebels. The leader of the rebels asks you to kill one of the passengers. If you don't, he will kill them all. The question: do you kill someone? If so, how do you select the person?

I realized that all moral dilemmas that he came up with always stemmed from a previous immoral action over which you have no control. In the case of the problem above, the previous immoral action is the rebel leader deciding that some or all survivors will be murdered.

Though the parallel is tenuous, it's there.

In debugging, we are attempting to apply logic to a previous breakdown in our logic. It's the poor choices of ourselves or others that lead us down the path of debugging. Is there a universal logical approach to resolving breakdowns in logic, or is it more of an art?

I debug well, but I don't always succeed. Your comment "hackers gain insite into life by how they debug" is very applicable to me. Oftimes, when faced with my breakdowns in logic, I am tempted to just run to others for help (hence, some of my posts to Perl Monks). Sometimes, I just want an answer, rather than figure out what's going on. Hmmm... now I'm seeing parallels to religion. I'll stop now before this becomes a full-fledged rant.

In reply to RE: Debugging by Ovid
in thread Debugging by Crulx

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