[hhenn]

The idea that being a "dumb" programmer helps with debugging reminds me of a tactic I see people use on StackOverflow. Some programmer will post a problem they're having, and lots of ultimately unhelpful solutions will be suggested until someone else asks "what are you trying to accomplish?" and then it's suddenly made clear that the programmer's problem was being approached in the wrong way.

I've seen this happen so many times on SO, with good results, that it's become the way I want to think about other problems in life.

[6chars]

This is common enough on SO to have a name: the XY Problem.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy...