Steve McConnell Quotes

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.

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.

Ideas, and even the detection of errors, require more than care and caution.

A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub. (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)

I was eventually persuaded of the need to design programming notations so as to maximize the number of errors which cannot be made, or if made, can be reliably detected at compile time.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

The only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

It is the duty of every man, as far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

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

The real value of tests is not that they detect bugs in the code but that they detect inadequacies in the methods, concentration, and skills of those who design and produce the code.

Without the errors which lie in the assumption of morality, man would have remained an animal.

There's always this assumption that you're going to get everything right immediately. And any professional understands that that's just not so.

Programs should be written and polished until they acquire publication quality.

Error is far more common than fraud which probably comprises 1 percent or a tenth of a percent of the literature.

Even granting that the genius subjected to the test of critical inspection emerges free from all error, we should consider that everything he has discovered in a given domain is almost nothing in comparison with what is left to be discovered.

The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.

Certain teams are more careful in what they write. They generate less bugs. You can know that but it still doesn't mean there might be there might not be one bug that would be bad to ship the product with.

Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.

We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.

A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.