Debugging

The road to wisdom - Piet Hein

THE ROAD TO WISDOM

The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
    Err
    and err
    and err again
    but less
    and less
    and less.

 Piet Hein, Grooks (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1966)

"Bug" as defined in the Jargon Dictionary

Bug. n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).

Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."

No one ever gets it right the first time.

• Syntax errors
• Simple bugs
• Logic errors
• Solving the wrong problem

or the second, usually

Debugging is as much of an art as it is a science.

A lot depends on experience