Quotes About Debugging

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.

pdb also includes a postmortem function (pdb.pm()) that you can run after an exception occurs, to get information from the time of the error. See

As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

They spent a week or two testing the circuit together for a few hours each day. Debugging a complex electronic device being almost as powerful a bonding experience as, say, serving on a submarine in wartime, Metcalfe learned a lot about his partner: That he was a digital whiz, accomplished at wielding the oscilloscope, and, most interesting, underemployed in his POLOS work.

Remember, though, that debugging is as much art as it is computer science [..]

A 'passing' test doesn't mean 'no problem.' It means no problem *observed*. This time. With these inputs. So far. On my machine.

Remember, code is your house, and you have to live in it.

There's a tradition among programmers to see mistakes not as a sign of failure but as "bugs" that can be fixed. An important part of becoming a programmer is to learn strategies for debugging—that is, how to identify and isolate a problem, then make changes to get around the problem.

Errors in code are what programmers call bugs, though when our programs go wrong, we prefer to call them "unexpected additional features." Very