Firstly, respect to dws, good node, good code.

Secondly: Listen to your intuition, it can tell you things you didn't know that you knew.

As pointed out it can help you when you have a specific situation in hand and you are trying to resolve it but sometimes, just sometimes, it can warn you that you've done something stupid. Many times when I have been coding, shooting in a match (my hobby) or doing chemistry lab work (my degree) I get this nasty feeling, as if something is out of place: Nine times out of ten there is something I have forgotten or not taken into account.

A good example was when I was playing with a mail filter at work which was supposed to take mails with a certain sequence of headers and forward them internally for handling by a Perl script, as it so happens. I'd set this up but hadn't set it running yet when I took a cigarette and caffeine break. I started to get the strange feeling that I had made a serious cockup, not just the will-it/won't-it work kind of feeling I get when I first launch a script or similar. I realised after that I had forgotten to change the relevant mail headers, which, as I found out after I checked with someone else, could possibly have resulted in an infinite loop of emails, augmenting by one in number each cycle. Ooops, can anyone say "network thrash"?

You might be wrong but won't you be happy and won't your confidence get a boost if you find out that your code will work?

Elgon

In reply to Trust your feelings, Luke! by Elgon
in thread On the peril of discounting intuition by dws

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