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Comment by newsbinator | Hacker News Reader

These cases seem to come up often (weekly?) in software development. I wonder how often they come up in other professions.

One common case is when you change or delete a comment, and suddenly something breaks. It couldn't have been the comment... but it was working fine before my edit... wasn't it?

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And then as you look closer, you wonder how it ever worked. Hang on, did it ever work?

I lost quite a few hours trying to restore a feature after I made a commit, only to find out that it was broken for weeks already. Or worse, was not even implemented yet.

It's amazing how that just keeps on happening.

This gettier concept is new to me, but what's certainly not new is trying to wrap my head around errors in the code. I'm a relatively new developer and I've many times asked more seasoned coworkers about what they do with all the their thinking they perform and possibly code they write during a long error invalidation process. Say you try fixes b,c,d,e,...,z (some of which might be objective improvements, now more robust code) then you finally fix the bug by trying solution A. What do you now do with the code for attempts b through y, and more unclear, all the thoughts in your mind that went into those efforts? Just forehead slap and move on?

Considering the fact that so much of programming is error finding, it's useful (and probably necessary) to have a solid heuristic for quickly determining causal relationships.

Or the bugs that disappear when you're debugging and then come back hen you're not.

Also known as Heisenbug[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

I have had bugs that where fixed by recompiling the entire application

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