I don't know if it's really a mantra but the voice in
my head when I'm debugging often says "don't stop at one".
This comes from my boss/mentor during a work term at a
really cool shop
in 1984. I was coding on a Cray 1S at the time, and as
compiling was a long term process, he explained that just
fixing the one error that the compiler spat out was often
shortsighted, as there could easily be more examples of the same
error in other locations, or that error could have been
caused by an earlier error, or perhaps a more fundamental
logic problem.
These days I usually don't have too long to wait for my Perl projects to run
(either they are pretty short, or I construct tiny sample datasets for testing),
so I take this advice to mean "don't stop at the easy or 'obvious' answer, as it
is often neither".
--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser
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