I think this is a great reason to take a nap in the middle of the day if your environment is conducive to it. It works for me as long as the code is the top thing on my mind when I fall asleep.
Other debugging helpfuls:
- Rubber duck:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510032
- or just look at your code in a different editor/syntax highlighter. Pull up ubuntu in VMware fusion ;-}
Next morning I looked at the note and it was exactly right.
It's great when I can't solve a problem in the evening, get a good nights sleep, and then I am able to quickly solve the problem in the morning. Sometimes though I actually have dreams about sitting at my desk writing the code that I couldn't come up with during the day. On the one hand it's great to wake up in the morning with the solution to my coding problem. But on the other hand, I'm not sure it's healthy to have my dreams filled with the same thing that I do all day while awake. Whenever that happens I definitely make some extra time for my hobbies that don't involve computers.
For some reason any attempt to implement a Y-combinator for recursion was crashing and for a couple of days I had no idea what could be wrong - then sitting on a bus on the way to visit my sister I was looking at a cinema from the bus and the thought came into my head "it's your aggressive re-use of applicative nodes".
Sure enough next day I removed this attempt at an optimization and everything worked!
I've had a few experiences like that and I now know that if I find a really tricky bug the best strategy isn't to sit there all night looking at it but to go and get a decent nights sleep - there is a very good chance you will know the answer by the next morning.
Serious question.
There's a decent chance that story is actually lifted wholesale from a similar one told about Dali, except it was a spoon instead of ball bearings. I suppose it's the best you can do after melting your alarm clock.
To prevent himself from crossing all the way over the "genius gap" into deep sleep, he would nap with his hand propped up on his elbow while he clutched a handful of ball-bearings. Then he would just drift off to sleep, knowing that his subconscious mind would take up the challenge of his problem and provide a solution. As soon as he went into too deep a sleep, his hand would drop and the ball-bearings would spill noisily on the floor, waking him up again. He'd then write down whatever was in his mind.
Taken from: http://www.wilywalnut.com/Thomas-Edison-Power-Napping.html