Debugging Quotes - Page 2

• Early Apple machines - don't know how to answer what it was like since there were so few tools. Just had to keep debugging by isolating a problem, looking at memory in the limited debugging (weaker than the DOS DEBUG and no symbols) patch and retry and then re-program, download and try again. And again.

  Bob Frankston

  Memories, Apples, Trying

  8 Copy quote

• Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

  Donald Knuth

  Strong, Opportunity, Thinking

  "Computer Programming as an Art". Communications of the ACM, Volume 17, Issue 12, December 1974.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

  Jesse James Garrett

  Hard Work, Technology, Language

  8 Copy quote

• Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Improvement, Programming, Rapids

  Eric S. Raymond (2001). “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary”, p.27, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

  Alan Kay

  People, Trying, Done

  4 Copy quote

• Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time

  Eric S. Raymond

  Memories, Men, Errors

  Eric S. Raymond (2003). “The Art of UNIX Programming”, p.23, Addison-Wesley Professional

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%

  Donald Knuth

  Opportunity, Roots, Evil

  23 Copy quote