Quotes of the week

Posted Feb 9, 2008 21:35 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It's the opposite for me. When somebody else's code has a bug, I can often just read the code and see where it doesn't do the right thing. When I wrote the code, I'll miss the bug on reading the code the same way I did when I wrote it.

With the debugger, I have to understand the code intimately. I display a variable value or code path to see if it matches what I intended for it to be. With someone else's code, I don't really know what he intended a variable to mean or what code is supposed to run for what cases, so the debugger isn't much help.

The only place the debugger is especially useful with somebody else's code is when I can't tell from reading the code which piece of it handles my case, so a trace points me to the piece that I need to read more closely.