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Cornflake
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24 Dec 2011, 6:23 pm

^^ Might I therefore humbly suggest that you're doing something wrong? :wink:


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24 Dec 2011, 6:38 pm

Cornflake wrote:
^^ Might I therefore humbly suggest that you're doing something wrong? :wink:

Okay I rectify myself, programming is fun!

"If debugging is the process of removing bugs. Then programming must be the process of putting them in." -Edsger Dijkstra



Cornflake
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24 Dec 2011, 6:46 pm

Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


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24 Dec 2011, 6:51 pm

Cornflake wrote:
Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


You sure?
Ok I exagerated by saying 95% of the times, but a big part of the time is debugging.

I have already done 5 computer science courses at university on which I had to do programming. I always found programming to be very long and had to waste most of my time debugging. I always thought that it was normal.

Edit : Btw, I always tend to make mistake when writing something. I always have to recheck myself many times because I put wrong words or forgot to put one. I do the same thing when programming. Could I have some attentive issue or something? I thought that this was part of Asperger... Hyperfocusing and loosing track of what your doing.



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24 Dec 2011, 7:09 pm

*shrug*
Apologies; this is probably going to sound pompous, but I generally know enough in advance about the program I'm writing for there to be little required by way of debugging - and much of that is because of silly typos generating compile-time errors as opposed to functional errors.
It's not often I need to completely restructure or rewrite although on-the-fly tweaks are sometimes required as better ideas surface. Most times, it's already running in my head and it's just a case of getting it out onto the keyboard.
WW-III could start when I'm working like this but I doubt I'd notice.


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24 Dec 2011, 7:18 pm

Cornflake wrote:
*shrug*
Apologies; this is probably going to sound pompous, but I generally know enough in advance about the program I'm writing for there to be little required by way of debugging - and much of that is because of silly typos generating compile-time errors as opposed to functional errors.
It's not often I need to completely restructure or rewrite although on-the-fly tweaks are sometimes required as better ideas surface. Most times, it's already running in my head and it's just a case of getting it out onto the keyboard.
WW-III could start when I'm working like this but I doubt I'd notice.


I understand. I've been struggling like hell to understand the last algorithm I had to implement. Everything was so unclear. They didn't even give all the formulas needed. I had to derive myself some complex integrals... Damn Bayesian statistics...

But I'm probably still making too much errors when writing. I'm quite slow and inattentive.



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24 Dec 2011, 7:21 pm

I love programming. It's the only time I totally lose myself, by myself.

These days I'm like you, Cornflake. I tend to spend a good chunk of time apparently doing nothing while the structure sorts itself out in my head, then I quickly put it together, then I smash my head against the stupid bugs (they're always stupid ones) until I fall asleep. The next day I can finish it because my mind spent the night debugging.



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24 Dec 2011, 7:35 pm

Wow yes, that's exactly it! :lol:
It seems that the less effort I put into solving it, the quicker the ideas seem to bubble up. I just need to picture it running in my head and it forms, complete. Functions float into view more or less automatically.
And having your mind spend the night debugging? Perfect description. I've gone to sleep watching the code doing its thing and studying a problem area, then find I have the answers waiting for me when I wake up.


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AngelKnight
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30 Dec 2011, 5:54 pm

Ichinin wrote:
AngelKnight wrote:
Yeah, there's less room for doing interesting things. Necessity's the mother of invention, and most situations bring more computing power than necessary for a given problem.


Generally you just stuffed your code at $C000 and stored/loaded the registers on fixed memory positions to overcome that problem.


Wouldna worked quite right coding software on an Apple //. As a kid I didn't have the tooling to cut my own EPROMs.



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30 Dec 2011, 6:24 pm

Cornflake wrote:
Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


When? Where?

ruveyn



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31 Dec 2011, 6:10 pm

leviathans wrote:
Programming is not that fun since you're spending 95% of your time debugging :x


Programming IS fun when you realise that you can cut that 95% time in 1/3 by ditching most of the original 5% and rewriting the code from scratch using a different approach = without bugs. I used to be like you, banging my head against the wall, but i rethought the whole process and now i am a better coder.

Give it a try.


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lau
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31 Dec 2011, 8:55 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Cornflake wrote:
Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


When? Where?

ruveyn

I'd quite like an answer to that one (two), too.


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Cornflake
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31 Dec 2011, 9:38 pm

lau wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
Cornflake wrote:
Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


When? Where?

ruveyn

I'd quite like an answer to that one (two), too.
It's one of those annoyingly trite aphorisms which perpetuates a lie.
When software has bugs then it is true, entirely by accident.
But software can be written which does not have bugs, therefore it is untrue.
It can't be both.


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31 Dec 2011, 11:25 pm

Redacted



Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 5:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

Robdemanc
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02 Jan 2012, 3:08 pm

nat4200 wrote:
leviathans wrote:
Cornflake wrote:
Dijkstra is wrong. Sometimes.


You sure?
Ok I exagerated by saying 95% of the times, but a big part of the time is debugging.


From what I've heard this is true for programmers that get stuck doing code maintenance on enterprise code bases. Which a lot must do.

Also without the context of the quip (which does seem trite) I'm incline to think Dijkstra's quote may have had merit, perhaps as a cautionary reminder that "to err is human" and to try code to catch the bugs that even the best programmer will eventually, mistakenly, introduce (which is probably second nature to any skilled programmer).


I think if you know the application area well enough you can anticipate some bugs and catch them.



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03 Jan 2012, 3:24 am

Redacted



Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 5:58 am, edited 1 time in total.