A few days ago, I saw a trailer on CNN in favour of their teletext. A journalist first said that a picture was worth a thousand words, and the tearing down of a Lenin statue was shown. Then he remarked, that OTOH "in the beginning was the word", and there were printed examples of words that easily bring up many pictures and associations inside your head. The journalist then remarked that it had taken mankind a long time to develop the alphabet and that it was worth while to honour words.

This trailer later ignited a discussion about books and written text. I remarked that the internet, too, had begun with ASCII text and newsgroups, and that several books like "1984" as well as the real existing history of the socialist states where dissident writings were even copied by hand (Samizdat) proves the revolutionary power that lies within books and words. As all perlmonks would agree, I suppose. In books, ideas are compressed, to be unfolded each time a person reads them.

But now to a more interesting point of this issue. Each time I read a book, it provokes different ideas than last time, although the text itself has obviously stayed the same.

I then concluded that the same must be true for code.

I do not even dare look at the code I wrote in the old BASIC days more than ten years ago (I can't anyway, the disks are lost), but even perl code from, say, two years ago, often makes me think to myself "what was my intention? why did i do this?" and things like that. Like code just seems to have the same effect as literature, you read it again and again at different times, and you get a very different impression.

Now maybe this meditation, pointless as it may seem, could actually bring forth some new aspects of debugging. If I just had the time to lay code aside for a longer period of time, and then revisit it, all before releasing it, so that I could have different views on the same project. Unfortunately, my customers mostly expect to see their demands met in time, and there is no other person in the company to do a proper code review. But already a pause of several days, before revisiting the code, seems to have the beneficial effect of a changed perspective, and I think that is a great benefit to debugging!

fraktalisman keeps rolling

In reply to Reading the same text and getting a different impression by fraktalisman

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