Re: Re: Are debugging skills atrophying?

in reply to Re: Are debugging skills atrophying?
in thread Are debugging skills atrophying?

I agree, every professor I've had for programming courses has told me to work on the smallest increment that I can find, and make sure it works and you understand it before going on.

The problem that I've been struggling is that I have a hard time seeing the small parts, I want to see the whole right away. I've tried to fix this problem by working on small, generic functions (since taking a few OOP classes), and that's seemed to help me a lot. By working on the smaller functions, I tend to find bugs quickly.

Arashi

I'm sure Edison turned himself a lot of colors before he invented the lightbulb. - H.S.

Comment on Re: Re: Are debugging skills atrophying?

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Re: Re: Re: Are debugging skills atrophying? by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 27, 2001 at 22:09 UTC
Well, if you can't see the small parts, work from top down first. I've often coded things as: `my $data = get_data(); process_data($data); print_result();` [download] literally, as if it were pseudo code. Then I write stub routines, like: `sub get_data { # returns scalar data pointer to my structure my $return_value; my $db = open_database($credentials); # must declare this above my $data = query_db($db, "select * from bar"); $return_value = massage_data($data); return $return_value; } sub open_database { my $cred = shift; warn "open_database doing nothing"; return undef; } ...` [download] and so on... Then at any time, I can "run" what I've got. And stay focussed on each area of development. If I need a class, I'll develop a generic class that I can plug in. Again, the goal is to type a dozen-ish lines of code, then invoke it. That's nearly always been possible. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Re: Re: Are debugging skills atrophying?
by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 27, 2001 at 22:09 UTC

my $data = get_data();
process_data($data);
print_result();
[download]

sub get_data {
  # returns scalar data pointer to my structure
  my $return_value;
  my $db = open_database($credentials); # must declare this above
  my $data = query_db($db, "select * from bar");
  $return_value = massage_data($data);
  return $return_value;
}

sub open_database {
  my $cred = shift;
  warn "open_database doing nothing";
  return undef;
}
...
[download]

Again, the goal is to type a dozen-ish lines of code, then invoke it. That's nearly always been possible.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
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[select]

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