Pearls of Wisdom

I have been reading Code Complete in the middle of all this chaos. It keeps my spirits up. It is nice to tank up on some good research data and sound advice for the construction of code. The last chapter I read was about "Debugging".

Here's a quote, I found interesting:
"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

What this means is that either you have to write code so perfectly that you will never need to debug it, or that you write it as simply as possible and use good, standard approaches in constructing the code.

You actually might get both if you follow the latter approach. It will be difficult to insert bugs into code that's written simply and therefore might never need to be debugged.

That follows the General Principle of Software Quality (by Steve McConnell):

"Improving quality reduces development costs."

in other words,

"You don't have to choose between quality, cost and time - they all go hand in hand."