Re: Tricking Our Egos

[Albannach]

in reply to Tricking Our Egos

I really like your idea and will certainly try it! If I can still fool myself by setting my watch fast then your trick is sure to work on me.

One thing that I learned long ago from a venerable old C hacker I worked for was the simple yet for me effective admonition that goes something like: "never stop at one bug" - I can still hear this in my head when I'm debugging (and no, the meds haven't helped ;-)! I have evolved two ideas from this:

• if you're reading code and see something wrong (or you think is wrong), don't just "fix" it (possibly breaking it or something else more in the process) but keep reading until you fully understand what is going on.
• even if you do fully understand a bug and fix it, keep looking as there could be more than one (well not in my code but there are people... ;-)

This was great advice back when compiling almost anything was at least a "get a coffee" event, if not a "come back after lunch" event, but I think this approach still saves me time even today when most of my stuff compiles in seconds. I often see people find a bug/error, edit the code to fix that one thing, then re-compile/run to get the next bug/error... that gets me cranky!

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser