Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Bill]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> 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
I won't claim to be any sort of "expert".  But one memorable problem, 
for me, was ultimately accounted for by the "inherent problem" of the 
floating point variables x0 and xo coexisting in the same module.  It's 
sort of funny if you think about it just right. FWIW, my job was to fix 
the problem, I didn't create it!

Bill