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.
Some kinds of bugs...
- 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
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last modified on Friday, 01-Sep-2006 14:47:51 EDT