in reply to Are debugging skills atrophying?
In any event, I think the most important thing I learned in my 28 years of programming is "debugging is hard". So I spend nearly every moment of my time while I'm programming thinking about how not to put bugs in in the first place, or at least have a pretty good idea what I just broke on the last edit cycle.
My methodology is basically:
- Start with an empty file.
- Write a dozen lines of code
- Run it
- If that doesn't work, add a few warn statements until I see what I broke, and fix it.
- Add another dozen lines of code. Repeat.
Another element is "understand what you type". You should be able to have a complete mental model of every step of what you type. Yeah, it sounds so basic, but I'm amazed when I watch my students copy random lines of code into their program and then say "it didn't work". When I ask them what a particular line does, they say "I don't know". Gosh, how do they expect it to work then!?
So maybe the combined rule is "never type faster than you can understand". {grin}