A. Pagaltzis wrote: > * Michael Higgins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-12-05 22:40]: >> Isn't that some general principle, you find the error just >> after emailing a whole bunch of people? > > Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your > code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain > the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few > sentences, followed by an embarrassed “Never mind. I see > what’s wrong. Sorry to bother you.” This works remarkbly > well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One > university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help > desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain > them to the bear before they could speak to a human > counselor. > > —Brian W Kernighan, Rob Pike, “The Practice of Programming” > > Reportedly, this noticably reduced the load on the understaffed > centre.
We had a teddy bear at one place I worked. I can testify first- and second-hand that it worked well :) Cheers, Dave _______________________________________________ List: [email protected] Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
