Keith Devens .com

Advice to programmers

If I could give one piece of advice to any budding programmer, or any seasoned programmer who's maybe in a slump, it would be this: Learn to like debugging. You're guaranteed to spend a whole lot of your life doing it, and it's really as much of a problem solving task as the original programming is. Obviously it's not as fun as getting your features done, and we should do everything possible in improving our craft so we can more often get things right on the first try. But really, you have to teach yourself to like debugging.

That's why I liked so much what Paul Graham had to say:

I like debugging: it's the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win in the end. It's as relaxing as painting a wall.

It helps if most of your bugs are "Oh, that's interesting, I didn't think of that", or "Oh neat, that was an interesting side effect I didn't expect", rather than "Damnit, I can't believe I forgot to do that." Hopefully as you become a better programmer you have fewer of those, but either way, as a programmer, probably your best bet for keeping yourself happy is to teach yourself to adopt Graham's attitude.

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04:57 (utc-4)