Programming Debugging Quotes & Sayings

Programming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning. — Nicholas Negroponte

If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra

Debugging: what an odd word. As if "bugging" were the job of putting in bugs, and debugging the task of removing them. But no. The job of putting in bugs is called programming. A programmer writes some code and inevitably makes the mistakes that result in the malfunctions called bugs. Then, for some period of time, normally longer than the time it takes to design and write the code in the first place, the programmer tries to remove the mistakes. — Ellen Ullman

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger. — Robert C. Martin

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. — Eric S. Raymond

Huh. Programming. Debugging. It wasn't Lincoln's favorite, but it beat archiving and compressing. At least it was a problem to solve. And it would only be for a few months, maybe less. — Rainbow Rowell

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

What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality that she thinks she'll get complex software right the first time? — James Alan Gardner

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. — Maurice Wilkes

Debugging tip: For server applications, be sure to always specify the -server JVM command line switch when invoking the JVM, even for development and testing. The server JVM performs more optimization than the client JVM, such as hoisting variables out of a loop that are not modified in the loop; code that might appear to work in the development environment (client JVM) can break in the deployment environment (server JVM). — Brian Goetz