Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> What I think is more important than how *long* it takes is
> *how* they go about finding the bug.
>
> A novice will make wild guesses about what might be wrong
> and make random changes to the program in the hope of
> making it work. An experienced programmer will conduct
> a series of carefully-designed experiments to narrow
> down the cause.
>
> A result of this is that a true expert will never have
> to try a thousand possibilities. He will be able to
> search a space of N possible causes in O(log N) operations.
>
> This doesn't necessarily translate into time, because
> in some situations the experiments can be very time-
> consuming to perform. But other things being equal,
> the expert's bug-finding algorithm is faster than the
> novice's.

This is very true, which is part of why I said that in programming, it
takes one to know one - to observe a candidate and determine his/her
experimental technique, you basically need to yourself be a
programmer.

ChrisA