“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place.  So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

Kernighan and Plauger

There’s supposedly a very similar quote attributed just to Kernighan, but I chose this one mentioned in this blog which also gave me a date of 1974.

There are two assertions in this statement, and I am pretty sure that the first is not true any more given that we have modern visual debuggers provided by tools such as Visual Studio.  Debugging can be even be fun!  But I think it is certainly fair to say that  advanced debugging on a platform like Windows can easily extend complexity greatly. Continue reading →