On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 2:27 PM, <tlaro...@polynum.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 09:54:28AM +0000, Greg Comeau wrote: > > > > Some more food for thought: > > > > "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. > > Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, > > definition, not smart enough to debug it." --Brian Kernighan > > > > With a caveat: when one is really clever, one finds "the shortest path > to the truth" i.e. the simplicity; this means that really clever guys > make programs easy to debug because these are the simplest ones doing > the job. > > In Brian Kernighan's sentence, s/cleverly/sophisticatedly/ (this is > probably a barbarism, but in french "sophistiqué" is pejorative: > obfuscation, convoluted etc.).
I think one can usually read things into such phrases, sometimes validly sometime invalidly. I also think it is often easy to disprove such phrases, and so to instead to often just try to find the spirit of the phrase even if it is found to be problematic. For instance, easy to debug could mean the program is so riddled with problems just opening to a random part of it will yield a problem with little effort it could also mean to the contrary that it was written so well that any bugs could be easy to find, but equally on the contrary the program could be such a bleeping mess that even though bug riddled getting through the logic etc could be tormenting at best while at the same time a clean program with few bugs can sometimes make finding "the long bug" harder because it is the lone last one. In the end there is often no pure bug cause or pure bug resolution mechanism but something in the middle that is contextual. All IMO. -- Greg Comeau / 4.3.10.1 with C++0xisms now in beta! Comeau C/C++ ONLINE ==> http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout World Class Compilers: Breathtaking C++, Amazing C99, Fabulous C90. Comeau C/C++ with Dinkumware's Libraries... Have you tried it?
