| I'm glad I found someone who shares my point of view. You're right about IDEs and debuggers. > Instead, I believe in thinking carefully about the problem. Close your eyes and visualise the program and its data and control flow in your mind, then write the code. Use a whiteboard or even pencil and paper to collect your thoughts and get a good mental model of what you're trying to accomplish. Block out all other distractions and focus on the problem. It's funny how many problems I've solved by writing code on paper/whiteboard when I got stuck doing actual programming. It's so much easier to focus on the problem when there's no code to run. Another thing I found useful is just reading the code outside of an editor. Either by printing it out and scribbling over it with a pencil, or just reading it on a phone/tablet that can't run the code. > Many others I've talked to are in disbelief when I tell them I can spend an hour writing several hundred lines of code that compiles and works flawlessly the first time, but this is what careful thought will allow. I've been having the same experience. Recently at a uni we were given an assignment to write an interpreter for a rather simple imperative language (conditionals, loops, simple recursive functions and stack depth checking). We were given 3 hours to write a program that could interpret a sample program. Most people struggled to get anything working at all during that time, since each and every one of them I talked to didn't have a clear picture of they were trying to build. It took me a little over an hour to write the whole thing in almost a single pass, in a modular fashion with separate tokenizer, parser and evaluator with the necessary checks. There was no need to run the code, most of it was rather trivial, implementing simple state machines. It was quite a bit of code (over 1000 lines), but there was almost no thinking required if you knew how the parse tree should look. In situations like this I'd even say it's hard to make the program not work if you're methodical, working step by step and checking if you've covered all the cases. |