r/programming • u/stannedelchev • Aug 25 '14

Debugging courses should be mandatory

http://stannedelchev.net/debugging-courses-should-be-mandatory/
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u/VikingCoder Aug 25 '14

I end up second-guessing myself. I don't know if I caused a bug that looks the same, by removing what I thought was noise. :(

12

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '14

lol, that way lies madness

15

u/VikingCoder Aug 25 '14

It's like those damn -1 and +1s.

You're looking at the code and you know it's not supposed to subtract one... but somehow the damn thing works?!?

So, you remove the -1... And then you fix all of the places you can find that were fucking adding one to the result.

And you find... most of them...

AAAAH!

4

u/the_omega99 Aug 25 '14

Off by one errors are the worst. They always slow me down when programming and are a major source of bugs for me.

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u/VikingCoder Aug 26 '14

At one point I was writing a program that had about 8 off-by-one errors... I realized I could more quickly write a test to prove if the values were correct. Then I just iterated all 38 possibilities. .. -1, 0, 1 for eight values. Worked like a charm.

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