🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 23 Feb 2018 01:02:36 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2018-02-22, Charles Richmond <nume...@aquaporin4.com> wrote:
> 
>> Debugging can be similar to this.  You can work for hours to track down
>> a bug... only to find out that you did something very stupid to cause
>> the problem!!!  Most bugs I tracked down... ended up being bone-headed
>> mistakes instead of important conceptual errors in implementing an
>> algorithm.
> 
> And, of course, after slaving over it for hours, a cow orker walking by
> will spot it instantly.

The thing to do is go and do something else, and come back to it. Even 
five minutes can be enough.

But, better still, get drunk. When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, 
one of my programs would occasionally cause a temporary halt in our 
timesharing system. Eventually the system manager gave me a dump of the 
entire timesharing system from the latest occurrence, and said 'fix it'. 
It was a listing about a foot thick. I left it in the corner of my room 
for several days. On Saturday night I went out and was definitely far 
from sober when I returned. I evidently decided it was time to look at 
the dump, although I don'e remember anything. The next morning I woke up 
to find the dump had, scribbled on the top sheet: "Uninitialised variable 
in fourth word of VFILE parameter block". And so it was.



-- 
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