Re: Move along, nothing to see here . . .

[mertserger]

in reply to Move along, nothing to see here . . .

"Once again, stumped for too long, yet writing this out worked me through the steps to resolve this question for myself."

I know that feeling - the numbers of times I have started to post a question to Perl Monks asking for help, only to find the process of writing the problem down helped me see the answer.

[Utilitarian]

From "The Practice of Programming" by Brian W Kernighan & Rob Pike:

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 remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer centre 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 counsellor.

[Anonymous Monk]

Also known as teddy bear debugging , mirror debugging, empty room debugging, talking to yourself, Rubber Duck method of debugging, say it out loud George , sing into that hairbrush ...

• http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/tpop/debugging.html
• http://developers.slashdot.org/story/04/02/21/228241/Debugging
• http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174.html
• I know what I mean. Why don't you?
• brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem