in reply to Greatest programming mistakes and what to learn from

Debugging lesson learned:

When faced with a logical paradox, check your assumptions,
You will always find that at least one is in error.

Wonko

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Re^2: Greatest programming mistakes and what to learn from
by Stevie-O (Friar) on Dec 23, 2004 at 07:00 UTC
    Bravo!

    Whenever I'm debugging a problem, and I have no idea what's going wrong, my first instinct is to say: Print out *all* the variables.
    My coworkers used to give me strange looks, and I'd get conversations that went like this:

    Me: "Hey, print the value of X"

    Them: "I know what it is. It's 3."

    Me: "Print it out anyway."

    Them: "Fine." Output: 3

    Me: "Good. Now print the value of Y..."

    Repeat for many, many variables (incidentally, this often became code that logged gobs of data to a file). Eventually, we'd get to a variable where my coworker thought it was one value, and the variable was another value. "Oh, crap! I see the problem..."

    This is especially necessary for languages like C where a runaway pointer or stack overflow can trash a variable from a completely different context.

    Fortunately, they're starting to understand my debugging methods now :)

    --Stevie-O
    $"=$,,$_=q>|\p4<6 8p<M/_|<('=> .q>.<4-KI<l|2$<6%s!<qn#F<>;$, .=pack'N*',"@{[unpack'C*',$_] }"for split/</;$_=$,,y[A-Z a-z] {}cd;print lc