Why do you like programming?

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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.

*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.

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.

Wow yes, that's exactly it!
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.

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

When? Where?

ruveyn

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.

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

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

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

People dont make sense, programming does. It allows me to make sense of my life when the people around me that I grew up with are making completely irrational decisions.

Totally, same. I also like the rules, and the security that there is a solution, I just haven't found it yet (when I have problems. It's been 2 hours of problems this morning, so this feels very relevant).