Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 6:59 AM, Bill <BILL_NOSPAM at whoknows.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> Be careful with this one. For anything other than trivial errors (and
>> even for some trivial errors), finding the bug is basically searching
>> through a problem space of all things that could potentially cause
>> this symptom. A novice could accidentally stumble onto the right
>> solution to a tricky bug, or an expert could search a thousand other
>> things and only get to the true cause after a long time.
>
>  some "expert"!   ; )
>

Yep. Pick anyone on this list that you believe is an expert, and ask
him/her for a story of a long debug session that ended up finding a
tiny problem. I can pretty much guarantee that every expert programmer
will have multiple such experiences, and it's just a matter of
remembering one with enough detail to share the story.

ChrisA