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Mark Dominus

@b0rk Here's Jeff Atwood's version of this, also inferior to your way of expressing it: "The First Rule of Programming: It's Always Your Fault".

blog.codinghorror.com/the-firs

14 August at 14:42 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mathstodon.xyz
3 comments
Julia Evans

@mjd yeah in general I find that debugging advice is often very… condescending? and it makes me mad

14 August at 15:10 | Open on social.jvns.ca
Brett Ritter

@mjd @b0rk The rules I teach my students are "the success or failure of you code is usually entirely due to you" and "the goal is to find the exact line of code that is not working as expected".

14 August at 15:53 | Open on mastodon.online
Mark Dominus

@swiftone @b0rk I call that "the Finger of Blame".

My kid was taking a programming class last year and I explained: "The goal here is to point the Finger of Blame: What part of the code is really responsible for the problem? First you accuse the code that actually prints the wrong result. Then that code says “Nuh uh, it was like that when I got it, go blame that other guy that gave it to me.” Eventually you find the smoking gun."

Julia would probably have a less recriminatory way of putting it.

14 August at 16:12 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
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