Monday, August 04, 2003

Don't you hate it when you cvs up, pull in someone (who ought to know what they're doing)'s innocent looking change, and it ends up breaking your stuff for the next three hours? 11:01:52 PM     comment []

Real programmers don't use debuggers, but working in Visual Studio .NET 2003 all term has spoiled me. I'm becoming a worse programmer because instead of *thinking* about the code you just wrote, it's seems easier just to set a breakpoint and try it out! Plus with the "Edit & Continue" feature you can actually apply code changes to a running program. These things encourage programming by experiment instead of by design. This evening I was supposed to meet someone at the gym at eight, but I was still at my desk at 7:58 because I didn't want to leave until this stupid thing I was working on actually ran without crashing. But instead of taking the time to actually think the thing through and plan it out, I just kept tweaking things as I single stepped through problematic section of code. Of course this actually took longer and was more frustrating than doing it right because I never actually fixed the problem and left for the gym an hour later aggrivated but having accomplished nothing. Here's what a real programmer, Linus Torvalds, has to say about debuggers w.r.t. Linux kernel development. Nice. 9:40:32 PM     comment []

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