Beginners and experts

[ROGER GRAYDON CHRISTMAN]

Not in response to any particular note, but to the thread as a whole.

Regarding how beginners make tweaks and changes at random,
hoping that the bug will disappear, where experts tend to be a bit
more methodical in their bug-fixing.

Here at academia I have taught a little bit of partial correctness,
using assertions and what-not to determine whether the code
is correct using mathematical proof techniques.

And then I would ask a test question for them to apply those
proof techniques to a perfectly good function, which contains
no errors of any kind.

And invariably I get those answers that randomly perturb the code instead.
Roger Christman
Pennsylvania State University