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Maybe not, but I think he does a pretty good job of showing how he is “just” taking logical steps towards understanding what is going on. Some of them probably didn’t pan out and were omitted but most of this debugging work is simply trying to understand more and iteratively zeroing in on the bug.

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I'm reminded of one of my Maths lecturers.

He argued that most proofs really only involve one insightful step. Really difficult ones might require two.

The rest is just 'turning the wheel'; each step is just doing the only thing you can do. The point of practice is to make those steps obvious; to learn to turn the wheel.

I guess when it comes to looking at core dumps, I don't even know where the wheel is, let alone how to turn it because it's something I have never done. It maintains that air of magic to me.

The fun thing about computers being magic is that the magicians are usually more than happy to show you their tricks :)

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