Re: Wasted Space and Kernighan
Re: Wasted Space and Kernighan
- Subject: Re: Wasted Space and Kernighan
- From: Bill Mutch <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2008 10:30:13 -0400
First let me say that the views expressed by Michael Ash are almost
identical to mine.
However, I have to take issue with the often quoted statement of
Kernighan on debugging.
"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." -- Brian W. Kernighan
Kernighan takes a general assertion on debugging and concludes that it
can be applied to any specific example.
That is simply not valid whatever his meaning of 'hard' or 'cleverly
as possible'.
Even a general conclusion is not valid unless by 'clever' he means
intentionally obtuse.
I would consider clever coding to be using one's imagination to write
code that accomplishes its purpose
in perhaps non obvious ways. It could even be easier to debug!
Code which I consider 'clever' that I wrote on an IBM mainframe in
assembler was designed to make and did make debugging production
programs considerably easier.
Bill
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden