Top 26 Debugging Quotes & Sayings

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

The three most important aspects of debugging and real estate are the same: Location, Location, and Location.

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

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

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.

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

One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you're trying to test.

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication.

Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

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

System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy.

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.

The most frequent complaint is that it's hard. True. it's a hard game to win Also, many people ask me how to use the secret debugging commands, apparently under the impression that I'll tell them.

The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

I do as much debugging as possible on the Mac, but I occasionally must debug problems in the PC world, which is significantly slower.

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.

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

System debugging, like astronomy, has always been done chiefly at night.

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code.

The wages of sin is debugging.

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%.

Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.