I spent like 2 hours on a really time sensitive bug today, I even resorted to asking chat gpt, the solution was… doing what I did in the first 5 minutes a second time… 😭
the worst part about debugging for me, is i have no idea how long it will be before i can solve a single bug. it could take me 2 hours, 1 day, a week, no idea. Because i have no idea where the bug came from. I have ti go through increasingly more detailed testing cycles. Then devise more laborious testing cycles. This is why i chose not to work as a programmer. In other professions, I know i can give an estimate of the time taken to complete the task. Debugging? No real idea. What if the boss says finish it by tomorrow? I might be there all night.
In my experience coming up through Windows desktop development, more than half the time the murderer was a closed source, compiled, dependency, that only behaved oddly in extremely specific circumstances.
the worst part for me, was not only being unable to estimate the time to solve the bug, i found that often the problem was in syntax or shadings of understanding on how functions or bracket syntax worked. i could refer to all the biggest programming books off the shelves, and the answers they provided would not work. Programming is one of those professions where answers lay with people who had busted their brains or lucked it trying to make it work, and had collected over many years, snippets of code which they knew worked. If you weren't chummy with these people, you would never find the answer. This isn't really a worthwhile profession. Unlike physics, or maths, where there is an independent answer governed by forces outside of an individual human, programming is a profession which inherently depends on learning errors from another human. It's a pointless profession and gets you nowhere in life at the end. Sadly. (Unlike say law, or accounting or physics, where at old age, you know more about the world around you.)
To get the nuance right, it’s like if you lived your very normal average every day life, day after day, never intentionally hurting anyone or anything. Then found out you murdered someone weeks/months/years after the fact and were asked how you did it.
It could work if it was some important code that caused some castrophic event… and the end he sees he actually changed those lines…that ended up causing the thing to fail.
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