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0 pointsethbr03y ago0 comments

I was taking my first multi-threaded resource allocation course when I first ran into the famous Kernighan quote.

> “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

It clicked and instantly disabused me of the notion that smart people write code that's any smarter than the minimum required to solve the problem at hand.

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teo_zero3y ago· 1 in thread

Kernighan wrongly assumed that to do something twice as hard, you need someone twice as clever. Most probably you need someone just as clever and twice the time.

It's a brilliant quote, though.

ethbr0OP3y ago

Fair. In my practical experience, it's 50/50 2x clever vs 2x time.

Mostly down to task decomposition.

Some of the stuff in compiler debugging? Just 2x clever, because you have to hold it all in your head at once to solve it.

Circuit debugging or data transformation debugging? You can break it down into smaller pieces, then methodically (and laboriously) worth through those pieces.

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