Re:Why debugging is all about understanding
by taeric on Thursday August 06, 2015 @11:09AM
(#10016963)
All too often, the "carefully designing" becomes some sort of masochistic ritual where all errors are attempted to be piped through a single tool in the dev chain. Static typing is popular nowdays. As are high level functional strategies.
It is great when these work. Or when you have a high level team that doesn't abuse the system at all and gets things done using these strategies. I have seen too many times where the result is a system that even the creator does not fully understand. Worse, what should be simple changes turn into giant modifications of a Rube Goldberg machine.
Re:Why debugging is all about understanding
by mannykannot on Sunday August 09, 2015 @01:51PM
(#10030840)
Just because it can be done badly is not a reason for abandoning it. To continue the aviation analogy, the solution there was to ensure that the people designing airplanes have had fairly rigorous training and that they have an adequate understanding of the relevant theory.
That's basically what the quote is implying - you should not be throwing things together and hoping it will work after debugging, but carefully designing to avoid bugs, so there won't be much if any debugging required.
An analogy to this can be found in the aviation industry: it's known that pilots do make errors and planes do crash, but such errors are treated as unacceptable and they try their hardest to minimise them. It's been a very successful strategy.