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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

Debugging is twice as hard as writing new code. So if you write code as cleverly as you can, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it.

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It's an interesting experience reviewing a "smart" solution you wrote years ago, and happening upon it again.

It's like opening a time capsule to yourself and getting nothing but a punch in the face.

“Smart” can also mean less code, more modularity, efficient algorithms. Obfuscated code is also “smart”, but in a different way.

My smart code plans for me to be sort of stupid and slow in the future, lacking the context I had when I was writing it. And I'm delighted when some seemingly hard problem has a simple, straightforward solution.

I often wonder what happened to me. There's a preponderance of evidence that I was smart in the past but very little that I'm smart today.

True, but you can keep writing fresh clever code until you wrote something that doesn't need debugging.

As of May 2023, we do not have the technology to produce bug free software. We have the technology to specify requirements, we have the technology to produce formal proofs, do verification of specifications ( ex. TLA+ ), and prove a software implements the specification. But what is this "something" that would not need debugging?

"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

   - Donald Knuth

Kernighan's Law, exactly.

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