On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, fooler wrote:
> > I believe that paper debugging is a good programming practice. It takes > > you away from the monitor and its dangerous radiation. It gives you time > > to think out your program, which you should have done in the first place! > > dont tell us to print our code in paper and do the debugging there :-> hey > this is not the era of fortran (paper programming) anymore :-> I am asking you NOT to debug your program on the machine -- instead I am proposing that you think out out your program, to prove that it is correct, by whatever means, show that it conforms to its specifications. Standard practice has shown time and again that debugging (which is actually program testing with various data sets) is the worst way of proving correctness. Some parts of the program are never encountered during debugging, even by the most careful testers. Isn't this the reason why one of the manned American space missions exploded in mid-air? Programming history is full of these cases of debugging failures. > if you think > radiation is a threat to you then buy a low radiation monitor plus a monitor > screen filter that will save you a couple bucks and development time in the > long run than buying a paper. :-> Radiation was just a lame excuse. That was not really my point. I am lamenting the fact that today, when a teacher assigns a programming project, the student immediately goes to the machine, with absolutely no idea about how the program should go, and then think-and-type. No brilliant piece of code was ever produced this way. Worse still, some student just copy their classmates work and then do cosmetic search-and-replace. When Linus Torvalds was writing his terminal emulator program which eventually lead to his Linux project, the first thing he did was not to run to his PC and type away. He first posted a question on the Internet, asking where he can find this particular RFC! Let us put back thinking into our programming. Let us not put the burden of writing a correct program to the debugger/tester. Let us write a program that is correct in the first place, so that there is no need to debug it. PMana _ Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
