2015-07-24 5:05 GMT-07:00 Prof Brucee <[email protected]>: > Look what I started. And All That Clever Code ... > > 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, by > definition, not smart enough to debug it. > > — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger in The Elements of > Programming Style.
Sigh. The proper text is: "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" This particular text comes from bwk directly. It's possible that he said something similar to the oft-misquoted version in a presentation he was giving around the same time as the book's publication, but there is no source material to verify and bwk doesn't remember given that this would have been over 40 years ago. (Source: I emailed bwk and pjp about this recently.) --dho
